Hello, I’m sorry I’m not aware of direct links between colon cancer and diabetes, however I understand diabetes and the use of drugs like metformin can make cancer imaging more difficult (CT, PET etc.) due to the contrast and methods used. However there are generally workarounds available for this. ...

Welcome to Club Gilbert! Yes I believe the onc reduced the irinotecan in my XELIRI to around 150 mg/m2, which was fine. I notice my bilirubin moves around quite a lot, and I did have a faint amount of jaundice in my eyes after chemo for a day or two. I understand this isn’t dangerous with Gilbert’s,...

My understanding is that calcification is generally a good thing with an improved prognosis - it broadly means that part of the tumour has ‘died’ and has converted to non-malignant/dead calcium-based cells. Often a tumour that has been radiated or ablated may calcify as it does, rather than disappea...

I also take 1,000 mg Niacinamide per day, but in the evening. Haven’t noticed any side effects at these levels.

Good you now have a clear dx. I haven't looked it up yet myself but do you know how to tackle it yet? No worries at all beach sunrise. Management is pretty hands off - the main things seem to be staying very well hydrated, and avoiding paracetamol/acetaminophen. Irinotecan needs to be dose-adjusted...

Just updating for completeness… got the genetic testing back and I do indeed have Gilbert Syndrome! Honestly that’s quite a relief at this stage given the prolonged isolated high bilirubin

I’m sorry about the news. I was planned to have a liver resection (my 3rd), and on the table they discovered extensive distant lymph node disease. So they converted the surgery to a lymphadenectomy, and we treated the liver lesions with radiation instead. As RP said, if a large surgery isn’t likely ...

That’s concerning, thanks for the heads up BC. Haven’t seen any shortages in Australia yet. Hope things resolve quickly over there.

I haven’t tried it myself, but I understand a fairly typical protocol is a 48 hour water fast prior to the infusion, and no re-feeding until treatment is complete. Unfortunately if you’re doing FOLFIRI this means an additional 48 hours fasting during the 5-FU infusion, to ensure you aren’t refeeding...

You’ve received some very good guidance above. I got Remote Second Opinions from both MSK and Dana-Farber / MGH. Each one cost around $1500 - 2000, and was done entirely virtually. The MSK opinion was quite good, and comprehensive, if not as somewhat negative in tone. I suspect I would have received...

Is there an update on how your treatment went? How is it possible you can do SBRT when you already had 28 days of chemorad? I thought we normally receive the maximum allowed radiation at where the anastomosis is located. I’m in a similar situation, but surgery has been the only option on the table....

Hi CancerWarrior, thanks for the posts. Many of the drugs here can be rough on the digestive tract. I’d like to suggest one drug which you may wish to discuss with his doctor, which is commonly marketed as Buscopan (hyoscine butylbromide). It’s available over the counter in the UK, Canada and Austra...

Good tip - Frankfurt is indeed busy. If the final destination is Coswig then you’re actually a fair bit closer to Berlin, or even Prague - although it’s in a different country it’s about 2 hours drive closer than Frankfurt/Munich.

Good luck!
Rob

Liver SBRT is usually an option even in the case of extra-hepatic mets, and it can still be very effective on larger lesions (even done sometimes in multiple courses of treatment for very large tumours). I won’t claim it’s as good as resection, but local control rates in the long term (multi-year) c...

Yes very fair points rp - sorry I wasn’t saying the info isn’t useful to me (it definitely is), but more my info may not be useful to others. Still as you point out there could be value, so I’ll recap below. Given Australia has a dual public (Medicare) and private system, I’ll indicate which items w...