Sorry to hear that. I don't know much info about lymph node mets, seems like it's a rare case. So what statistics says?
Hi Sevilla,
Good to know that your mother is getting care from some of the best doctors in your country. She is very fortunate in that regard.
I wanted to point out that in some very rare situations, rising CEA is difficult to explain. The paper listed below was published this year from the Netherlands. A patient's CEA has been rising for a year and the doctors dont know the cause yet.
https://www.sciencerepository.org/a-rem ... 2020-1-104 There is another forum
https://csn.cancer.org/ where I have found couple of people whose CEA has risen for a long time with no evidence of disease.
One such person has the id, zx10guy
Regarding my specific situation (metachronous isolated retroperitoneal lymph node metastasis), there is not a lot of data available. This is because such metastasis is very rare and studies regarding that are probably not helpful for a lot of people and are therefore not funded.
The following paper provided some poor statistics that has been bothering me.
https://www.annalsofoncology.org/article/S0923-7534(19)30783-5/fulltext#relatedArticles
This paper also did not have a great survival story-
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10. ... 09.01821.xThere are some anecdotal stories. Some are good, some bad.
In this story from Japan, a man has survived for long after the metastatic lymph node surgery.
https://surgicalcasereports.springerope ... 016-0177-yIn this other story, lung metastasis developed at the same time and the patient's disease became systemic.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 1221007057I have heard that cancer is personal and different for everyone and we should not be discouraged by poor statistics.