What I have been diagnosed with is a rare and aggressive type of cancer.
Selfie outside the Precision Cancer building at the UCSF Mission Bay campus
It has scared the crap out of me, and I am just starting to call it out by name in order to face it directly.
Cholangiocarcinoma. AKA Biliary Tract carcinoma. Or just bile duct cancer. Its specific location earns another label, a Klatskin tumor.
It’s a nasty cancer. The general prognosis is dismal.
But it looks like I could be among the few who are candidates for “curative” surgery, the only way to beat this thing. Tests done this past week at the University of California San Francisco Precision Cancer Building in San Francisco’s Mission Bay appear to have found no evidence the cancer has spread beyond the original location. That would seem to make a surgical approach in my case more viable.
i’m awaiting the “official” assessment of the surgical oncology option, which I expect to get soon.
Ths is, of course, only a very short version of what has been happening over the past seven weeks as the process of diagnosing and devising a treatment plan has been underway, initially in Hawaii and then in San Francisco.
The selfie was taken early Monday morning, April 13, as I waited for the building at UCSF to open so that I could check in for another CT Scan. I was probably looking more beaten up by the end of the week.
Please keep those positive vibes coming!
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Ian, this is dreadful news but advances in cancer treatment are galloping ahead. What was untreatable is now so often the subject of groundbreaking advances.
May this be a challenge you and the medics overcome, giving you something to tell us about in greater detail when it’s behind you.
With Aloha and prayers,
Bruce Graham
Yes, the rapid advances in treatments has kept me away from Google or other online searches, which I have personally found to be all too fallable. I’ll gladly accept the aloha and prayers! Thank you.
I won’t say “thanks” for that update, but I do feel privileged to have read this – and ALL of your posts.
Clearly (to me, anyway) taking a hiatus from writing wasn’t really what you wanted, was it? In my case, I quite often write famously (“notoriously” might be a better choice of words) TL;DR emails – that I then don’t send, once I’ve realized that I’m really writing them in order to collect my thoughts and , and there’s no reason to victimize my brother (etc) with eight pages of my disgorgements – no matter how clever or insightful they might be.
But I digress. I do hope you keep writing, and everything else, for quite some time to come.
I will only entertain thoughts of a victorious outcome, Ian. In the meantime, you and Meda will keep your place in my thoughts and prayers – sending you my aloha as always —
good plan!