Hello,
Everything started in february when my father told me that he has some blood in the stool and is probably from an internal hemorroid.After some days he started to have diarrhea but after 2 weeks stopped but he was still having some pain irradiating in the back area and blood in the stool occassionaly. Everything was on and off and in april he got a colonoscopy and they discovered a 7 cm sigmoido-rectal partially obstructing mass.
On 04/21/2018 he was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, one big liver metastasis that is in the right lobe and they are suspecting lung mets too but being very small they couldn`t be sure that are cancerous even after he did PET scan.
He started chemotheraphy on 05/07/2018 and the doctor said he`ll have every week one IV session with Oxaliplatin and monday to friday is taking Xeloda two times per day for 7 weeks.
He`s on his second week of treatment and his blood test results are great ,everything is in normal range but the pain from the colon mass is very intense if he is not taking pain killers and this worries me and I am having all kinds of thoughts that maybe he is not responding to the treatment.
The doctor said that he has 30% chances to be cured if the cancer did not spread to the lungs because the liver met and colon mass ca be surgicaly removed.
His oncologist reffered him to radiotherapy too for the colon mass and he`ll start from the next week the treatment every day from monday to friday for 5 weeks.
After that they said they`ll make another CT scan to see if the tumors are shrinked and if they will be then they`ll do the surgery.
I was wondering if anybody else is or have been in the same situation and how can we see if chemotheraphy is working beside the scans and CEA lab test because he doesn`t have any side effects yet but the fact that the pain didn`t decrease it keeps me worried.
Thank you