Letter from Bob Kinberg Tuesday, August 8, 2006 Ken, Thanks for your good wishes. I am recovering quite well from the surgery that was performed on August 2. I was discharged from the hospital this last Sunday, August 6, and plan to be back at work next Monday, August 14. Everything considered I, feel quite lucky. In truth, I think I may have dodged a bullet. Last Tuesday, August 1, I decided to go to my doctor because I had a mild but persistent discomfort in my lower right quadrant for a few days. Quite frankly, i thought it may have had something to do with the hot dog I had at the turn in the round of golf I played on the prior Saturday, because I started feeling really bad and tired on the second nine. My Doctor sent me over to the hospital for a CAT scan and blood test Tuesday afternoon. The scan showed something ambiguous going on around my appendix and the blood test showed I was anemic. They thought I may have had appendicitis, although I was not completely symptomatic of that, or that possibly there was a mass near the appendix of the type that was generally benign. The anemia was a mystery. An emergency laparoscopic surgery was scheduled the next day. What was found was an adenocarcinoma in the lining of my ileum, which is the distal portion of the small bowel that connects to the large bowel. I also had internal bleeding from the tumor into the ileum, which explained the anemia, and probably my exhaustion on the second nine!! The surgeon removed a portion of my ileum and my large intestine on either side of the tumor, which included removal of the caecum and appendix which hang there between. The pathology report which I just got yesterday indicated that there was no spread of the cancer to the surrounding lymph nodes or invasion of blood vessels. Given the condition I have, this was the best report I could have hoped for. I am not completely out of the woods as there is still some percentage chance of the cancer cells somehow ending up somewhere else in the body, the most likely place, I am told, being the liver. My next step is to consult with a major cancer center to see what kind of post-opt procedures, if any, I should undergo. If this were a colon cancer, for which there is much data, the normal post-opt would be chemotherapy which has proven to reduce the risk of reoccurrence of the cancer. But I am told that small bowel cancer is not colon cancer, and is in fact a rare cancer, and that cancer in the ileum is even more rare than cancer generally in the small intestine (aren't I the lucky one). So there really is not much data on what to do post-opt in such a situation. They may decide to treat it in the same manner as colon cancer and give chemo with the hope of reducing the chance of spread which has been successful in colon cancer (but not proven in ileum cancer), or to do nothing and just keep a close watch. I'll go with the flow, but I feel I have a pretty good chance of being cured with the operation. So, thanks for the email. I probably gave you an anatomy/pathology lesson that you did not expect. But the overall lesson is to listen to your body. If something doesn't feel right (particularly at our age) have it checked out, because there probably is a reason that something does not feel right. Feel free to circulate this email as I feel it can only help to increase medical awareness of our bodies Best regards, Bob back to WRITINGS |