Process for new bowel cancer diagnosis

Hi Elaine 

Thanks for letting us know your news. 
You must be so relieved now to have a consultation booked, hospital planned and your team sorted.

Now for the nice part, shopping , big knickers, three nighties, dressing gown and slippers. Jo Malone body lotion is a calming relaxing aroma and skin does dry in hospital. I had Channel 5 too.

I had a call this morning, my consultant meeting has been brought forward from a call next Tuesday, to being a F2F tomorrow. That's obviously good.

I received a copy of the referral letter today. It states my 'provisional staging', ie the stage the cancer is at.

It is T3aN1 M0.

As far as I can work out, what this appears to mean is:
# T3. Tumour size 3 on a scale of 1-4. I was slightly surprised it was graded this big but I guess per se it's not the biggest issue. They already said they think it has been there a year, perhaps more.
# I don't know what 'a' is. With other cancers, 'a' always seems to be better than b+.
# N1 seems to mean the cancer has spread to the local lymph nodes. They seemed undecided about whether it had at the meeting I had with the Basildon consultant. 1 seems to means a low number of nodes are affected
# M0 means no metastases.

Does anyone know if that's right? I'll ask tomorrow anyway...

Elaine

. Yes that’s exactly right and I’m not sure what the ‘a’ bit means either! I’ve attached the Macmillan link about staging. I was same stage as you and had 2 lymph nodes affect. My friend had the same initial staging but was found to have no lymph nodes affected from the histology report. 
https://www.macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/bowel-cancer/staging-and-grading-of-bowel-cancer

Hope the meeting goes well tomorrow

Take care

Karen x

Thanks Karen, that's really helpful information.

Elaine

Good luck tomorrow 

Thanks Ann, I'll let you know how it goes x