A fork in the road?

And we took it.

Turns out I had the wrong Dr Chang in my previous posting. This is the correct link for Dr. Daniel Chang. A very nice man except he graduated from Michigan. Golden Gophers have kind of a tough issue with that but I guess we'll muddle through.

The way the radiologist interprets the pathology reports takes the cyberknife out of the picture and puts in a linear accellerator treatment. LA radiation is a 5 days per week for a nominal 6 weeks procedure. In other words, its the tough, awful and nasty radiation and not the nice, easy to live with variety.

Dr. Chang was very nice and very clear. Basically, bile duct cancer is an extremely difficult cancer with little known about it--because it is so rare. The treatment he is recommending is because of the lack of adequate margins towards that 21% of the liver left after the May 11 surgery. He did say that Dr. Visser took as much as he could but he had to leave enough liver so Mary could live.

He went through the rundown of side effects. No one knows if Mary will experience any, some or all of the effects. Whatever happens, I am so sorry Mary has to go through it. I guess the worst effect is damage to intestinal tract that is now serving as her bile duct and if there is radiation damage, the fix is yet another surgery.

As for the household side of things, I have managed to cook bacon for Mary's BLT yesterday, roast potatoes as part of dinner (I'm excluding the microwaved foods), and fixed her a nice breakfast before we headed to Stanford this morning. She is not starving nor is she complaining about my food preparation. So, on that side we are doing ok. Marge is delivering a meal tonight (ribs) and Saturday (lasagna) and Ingrid is ready to prepare something as well. With friends like this, we'll do great getting Mary's strength back.

Mary continues to reduce her intake of the narcotic according to the schedule we created on Sunday so that is good news. She should be free of the narcotic by Sunday at the latest.