The Colon Club

Hi All,

I hope you are all traveling well. Been a good year for me, all CT scans and ultrasounds have come back as good. Still even this far out, I still get clustering on the occasional days, but I have complete control. So life could be better, but for what it is, im happy. I can work, play and do most things I did prior to diagnosis. If I have bad days i'll have some codeine and all will be well.

However, over the recent month or so I've been experiencing abdominal pains. Generally the whole area, its not all the time, perhaps maybe 4 times within the last month or two. The most recent one, had me down for the day, but the area still has a mild pain for days after.

I guess what im worried about is perhaps peritoneal mets.

I've never experienced this before, so this is why im concerned.

Any ideas? Has anyone else experienced something similar.

Sorry you’re going through this—i would ask your doctor—any sort of change like that ought to get you to the top of their priority list, and no one will question the alarm bells, even if it turns out to be minor considering the history involved.

As for personal experience, I’m not sure we can help much, since everyone is different, And only your doctor can really figure out what’s going on. Sorry!

When we want to reduce the odds of being months late on detection or surprises, we add extra biomarkers to the basic bloodwork (CBC + CEA + CMP or Chem20). We add some extra chemistry panels to see how stable potential noise factors like inflammation (ESR, hsCRP), sugar (FBG, HgbA1C) and thyroid (TSH) are.

There are a number of recent papers addressing extra markers beyond CEA, for detection or prognosis with peritoneal CRC mets. Basically they use CEA, CA125, LDH, CA19-9, CA72-4, ferritin with varying degrees of sensivitivity and specificity.

I found it interesting that Prof David Morris, a surgical cimetidine pioneer in Oz, analyzed prognosis with a reduced CA199 threshold, starting at 17 units for peritoneal CRC in his group's paper, vs 34 or 37 or 39 units typical for pancan detection, although 17 units is a little low for single time tests' detection with CA199. Kemeny was using LDH>200 for risk in her paper with CRC liver mets.

group with Morris (abstract only)
group without Morris full paper available
Kemeny's paper with LDH
biggest marker batch

Thanks All for your replys. Gives me some direction.

I'm sorry you're having pain!*hugs* I would talk to your doctor. I hope you feel better soon!*hugs*