You might want to look into the possibility that this is chemotherapy-induced gout. The symptoms sound about right. According to the rheumatologist who treated me when this happened during Folfox treatment, it's not unusual. On the other hand, it's rare enough that my oncologist was initially skepti...

Happy Birthday, Amy! It seems that we are on almost precisely the same calendar. My birthday is this Saturday, the day before yours, and my hemicolectomy surgery was on March 10, 2009. Next Monday I'll have been cancer-free for five years!! My CEA continues to run high, as it has for several years, ...

iceis, Good luck with your upcoming MRI. I don't think that you can generalize one person's experience in this sort of situation, where many outcomes are possible. Nevertheless, I had a very similar experience (right down to the point of not having posted here for a while). Around two years after di...

Congratulations! That's great news! With Stage IIIC the uncertainty can be almost as bad as the disease, since at first you really just don't know what to expect. But at this point, you can expect a very good chance that nothing bad will happen. I'm in a very similar situation but almost exactly a y...

Here in Coventry, CT, we got a rather amazing 32.5 inches according to the Weather Service. It's really quite beautiful out. The only problem is that we couldn't get out on the cross-country skis because of the statewide driving ban. So after clearing the walks and some of the edges of the roof wher...

What they said. As you can see in the note I just posted in the "NED for how long now" thread, my CEA has been fluctuating in the range 5.7-6.4 for years, just high enough to be really annoying every time a new value comes out. Yet nothing has come of it. Sometimes this test seems to be mo...

It's been a while now since I've posted to the forum, and it's really sad to see how many of the regulars from a few years ago are no longer with us. Fortunately, I still have a positive story to tell. The results of my annual CT scan just came in, and everything is identical to last year, and the y...

Although I didn't have any kidney stones to my knowledge, I developed debilitating gout about midway into chemo. I had some rare flare-ups previously, but nothing like this. It affected my feet very painfully and later my ankles, and eventually even caused edema in the ankles. By then I couldn't wal...

Just to clarify, Fusilev actually IS leucovorin, it's just a pure form of the levorotary version of the molecule. Like many molecules, this drug has a chirality --- it comes in left-handed or right-handed versions that are referred to as enantiomers of one another. The cheap generic drug is an equal...

The big online databases are kept pretty much up to date. If you really want the very latest data, you should be able to frame your own query to the SEER database using the web interface described at http://seer.cancer.gov/canques/. I've never actually tried to do this, though. There are also a numb...

Actually, there really does seem to be a CEA test kit from Abbott Laboratories. A Google search for "abbott cea" will yield numerous hits, ranging from a 1984 comparison against the Roche assay to a set of regulatory documents filed in 2012. I have no idea how many labs use which assay met...

It's primarily the trend that's significant with CEA, not so much the average value. And in this case there's no obvious trend. For what it's worth, I had CEA values in exactly the same range during 2009 and 2010. It averaged about 3.2 both during and after chemotherapy, even though my scans and col...

janey, You are probably referring to a hemangioma, which is basically a benign tangle of blood vessels. They are relatively common in the liver, and are not thought to pose any risk. If the CT scans are not definitive, you might want to ask whether a high-quality MRI scan is a possibility. These can...

There are quite a few past threads on this forum that provide further details on CEA testing. Basically the key is to look at trends more than at the absolute number, but even then the results can be somewhat erratic. Based on the many anxious posters and my own experiences, I'd like to suggest an a...

I'm sorry about your setback, but it's really very encouraging that it is only one spot, and that it's operable. Both of these factors really make a big difference in outcomes. Good luck!

-Ed