Doctor can not find the bowl Cancer????

Hi ,

Welcome to the forum . Sorry to hear about your mum . It is a difficult situation to get your head around but it does happen that they can’t locate the primary in the bowel but the cells have escaped and deposited cells in another organ . The cells are not the primary cells of that organ but the bowel where they have traveled from . It is almost as though the primary has resolved itself or completely hidden. 

However great news that they were able to operate . My mum had a spread from her bowel to her lung three years ago and continues to keep well . Also now they know where the primary came from if she ever needs chemo they can give her the correct one .

Send our kind regards to your mum and hope she continues to make a good recovery .

Take care,

Court 

Hi there,

Last year my husband was diagnosed with mCRC after a metastasis was found in his lumbar spine. A PET scan showed activity in his small intestine (which makes sense since he had Krohn's disease as a young adult); he had surgery to remove the 1" inflamed area (along with a safe buffer on each side). But when the lab results came back, there was no cancer!  Still, his oncologist is 99% certain that's where the cancer originated; it was probably a very small tumor that was destroyed by his immune system, unfortunately not before it had a chance to send cancer cells around.

About 3-5% of cancers have metastases but no primary is ever found, so it's not all that uncommon.  I'm really glad they were able to successfully operate on your mom!

Claudine