Hello everyone
This is first time I've started a topic but I'm following this forum since my mom diagnosis.
In September 2018 she was diagnosed with rectal cancer, the tumor was very big, it grew into vaginal wall and made a fistula. It was a complicated case but we found a great surgeon to remove everything. In November radical surgery was done and since then she is considered to be NED. Also the tumor was well-differentiated (G1) by results of both biopsy and surgery so I believe it explains why there were no distant mets while tumor was quite big. I hope(d) it's non aggressive. And also mom didn't have chemo after surgery because of a long recovery period after surgery.
Since then her CEA was always around 0.5-1 but it started to grow in the beginning of this year:
January - 2.1, March - 3.39, July - 11.59, and recent result in October is 95.51, which shocked me a bit. I mean, I expected that it would be growing but not SO much..
What is important, is July she had one shot of vaccine, in September she got infected with COVID-19 and also her knees arthrosis got worse around that time so much that almost all the time she is in pain
Also we made two more markers: CA 19-9 - 9.03 (0 - 37), CA 72-4 - 23.69 (0 - 6.9)
CA 72-4 seemed to be high also, not sure yet what it means
And yes, in April and July mom had 128-slice CT with contrast which was analyzed very thoroughly but our oncologist and nothing was found. That CT is expected to show even very little things like 1 mm but..
So while we are performing PET CT, colonoscopy and gastroscopy, I have following questions:
1. Anyone heard of CEA big jumps caused by COVID-19? I think I can't recall any cases of such a great difference between two measures (and I read a looot in this forum)
2. Does CA 19-9 and CA 72-4 shows anything specific when using for recurrence detection? I tried to find info about it but it didn't help me much... So maybe someone can share his/her experience?
Thank you all