The Healing Touch

What's that you say? I don't believe it!

As hard as it was to accept when I was first diagnosed with carcinoid cancer, it's almost as hard to believe that I might actually be free of it now.

Dr. Jeffrey Norton, my surgeon at Stanford, seems pretty cocksure about the job he did to remove the remaining cancer. "I'm an expert in carcinoids. I know what I'm talking about," he asserted during a follow-up exam last week. "We got it all."

The news is just too good to be true. In truth, I'm being cautiously optimistic, as is my oncologist, Dr. Alex Metzger at the Marin Cancer Institute.

I hate to say it, but I'm not sure I'll ever feel completely free from cancer. I know there's always the chance that it will come back. The price of freedom, as always, is eternal vigilance.

So, where do we go from here? Regular checkups, scans and Octreotide injections to help make sure the cancer doesn't sneak back in. Octreotide injections are used to soothe some side effects of treatment, but studies show it can also slow or stop the progression of cancer.

The list of Octreotide's potential side effects (depression, sluggishness, pain, nausea, etc) is daunting, but we just have to hope that won't come into play.

Unwilling to just wait and see what happens, though, I'm still looking at new and alternative treatments.

I was just watching a video from the Carcinoid Cancer Foundation's 14th annual Carcinoid NETs Symposium, where Dr. Edward Wolin of Cedars-Sinai was a speaker. It was Dr. Wolin who originally prescribed surgery in my case and he continues to consult with Dr. Metzger about my treatment.

Dr. Wolin suggested surgery to "remove cancer volume by more than 90 percent." He also proposed the use of heat treatment to obliterate small neuroendocrine tumors in the liver, which sounds similar to a recently-proposed treatment of breast cancer.

There are some new treatments going through trials that seem like effective tools in the fight against cancer, so the odds are getting better for patients.

In the meantime, we just have to do what's best for us: eat right, exercise, enjoy life and stay informed.