Four years after resection, and 3.5 years since the completion of Folfox, a small met appeared in my lung. It took 5 years from surgery to get big enough to biopsy. I had it removed in an super-easy lung resection 6 weeks ago. It was 1 cm in size, and the tissue removed had clean margins.
My oncologist walked me through the decision making process, talked to me about the available data, and suggested that we just do CT's every 3 months for a while to see if anything else pops up. She did offer chemo if it would help ease my mind, but said the data is not rich enough to tell if chemo has any effect of recurrence in my situation. I took my info to a research hospital, and another oncologist went through it and told me the exact same thing. All options are reasonable. There may be some benefit to chemo, or it may just do some damage without doing anything. And there may be nothing there for the chemo to work on.
Also, because my cancer is so slow growing, it may be unlikely that a cancer cell floating around in me would eat enough of the chemo.
But I need to decide this week whether to follow the oncologists' advice and just keep an eye on things, or take their slightly less enthusiastic advice and jump back into chemo. I would have the choice of Xeloda or 5FU.
Of course, I REALLY don't want to do chemo again, and I'm afraid that is clouding my judgement.