I know I just wrote about getting my MRI yesterday, but the actual scan was last week on Thursday. Typically, I have my scan and then within a week, I have my followup appointment with my liver surgeon. Occasionally, I will get my MRI results sent to me a bit sooner by one of my doctors, but I don’t expect to have answers until I have my appointment.
This time, when I was scheduling my MRI, I was told my liver surgeon was on vacation for 2 weeks after my scan. So the soonest I could get my followup appointment would be the week of Thanksgiving. While I didn’t love having a big gap between the scan and the followup, I didn’t really have an option unless I wanted to do the MRI later. So I booked those appointment times and tried not to think about it too much. Even though my scans always show the tumors smaller, I do worry a bit that for some reason they will be growing again. But I know that the chances of that happening are really tiny, especially with my history.
So after my scan was done last week, I tried to not think about the results at all. I knew that it wasn’t going to be anything horrible even if I was told that they were growing again. The worst case would be that they were growing and that I would have the surgery that I had planned for originally. And I’ve already put so much thought into that surgery so I wasn’t as scared about it as I was before.
I got a notification on Monday evening that I had a message from a doctor to read. I thought maybe it was one of my other doctors seeing the MRI report and just forwarding it to me. I wasn’t expecting my liver surgeon to be sending a message since I knew he was out of the office. But that’s exactly who emailed me with a really amazing message.
I will still be going in for my appointment in about a week and a half, but it’s so good to have some information now. I can think about other things and not have moments of wondering what is going on. And honestly, these results are so much better than what I expected them to be!
I knew that 1 of the 3 tumors was already so small that they basically couldn’t be found, but it was nice to have confirmation that it still is not seen anymore. I had it in my head that maybe the last time they missed it for one reason or another. At my last scan, I knew that the medium tumor had shrunk a tiny bit, but it was still visible. Now it has disappeared like the small one did before.
But to me, the best news was about the biggest tumor. That was the one that made things so dangerous for me when it was discovered. The placement and size of it both were risky. And that has been shrinking quite a bit. The biggest change was the scan I had right before I was supposed to have surgery when it went from 10cm to 4cm. And it’s slowly been getting smaller since then. Each year it has pretty much gone down another 1cm. The milestone I knew it needed to be under was 3cm, and 1 year after we discovered the tumors it had gotten there. And it just keeps going down.
Now, my biggest tumor (which I always say was the size of a newborn’s head even if that’s overestimating it a bit), is not smaller than the smallest one was when we discovered it. It’s no longer dangerous for me to have this tumor in my body (even though that has technically been the case for a little while now). The tumor is 90% smaller than it was just 3 years ago! That’s a huge reduction.
There are still a few things I’m going to go over with my surgeon when I see him, plus I want to see pictures of the tumor now. But from his message to me, I know I have nothing to worry about. I do have some questions about what things might trigger the tumors to grow again and what monitoring I will need to do under those circumstances, but none of those things should be happening soon for me. So it’s more that I just want an idea of what I’ll need to do in the future.
I think I’ll officially believe this news when I see the images since it’s hard for me to believe that it’s really going this well for me. But I’m so grateful that my luck with my health has gotten better and that I’m able to relax about things a bit more now.
