Hello,
I am writing on behalf of my wife who was diagnosed with rectal cancer last October. After a 5 week course of chemo radiation has now been told she has had a complete response. This is great news but the surgeon still advises a resection with a permanent colostomy. He wasn’t very encouraging about a watch and wait approach so we wanted to find out more before making a decision.
He said surgery was the ‘gold standard’ and safest option to prevent the cancer returning and said that if it did return then they could only offer palliative care which of course was very frightening so we were thinking that the surgery was the only sensible option.
However, having looked at some information on here we are less sure. Even with surgery there still some chance of cancer return in other places but he didn’t mention this. With close monitoring surely any spread would be monitored more closely than the monitoring after surgery? I asked about TNT but he said she didn’t need it. He also asked if a PET scan might be helpful but he said it didn’t show up small bits of cancer but I thought that was the whole point. We have gone from being totally confident in our surgeon to very confused and worried.
She has now been offered a sigmoidoscopy on Monday and in the letter from the surgeon that came this morning, he said if she wanted to watch and wait she could have a PET scan. We thought we could try watch and wait for a while and it it became too stressful then opt for surgery but don’t know if this would be difficult because of scar tissue etc. The list of surgery risks that accompanied the letter was very frightening and I know that these have to be mentioned but there were no percentages to help with knowing how likely the various scenarios are. (Death for example!)
I appreciate you cannot make any recommendations etc but if we could find out where to get more information on the statistics of outcomes after surgery versus a watch and wait approach we would be very grateful.
Thank you.
