Since my mum’s diagnosis in November, I have been hoping for any tiny glimmer of hope. She is an otherwise healthy, 56 year old who has never smoked and kept healthy, so her quick deterioration and diagnosis back in Autumn came as the biggest shock to all of us. Her metastasis is bone and peritoneal nodes and this is where a lot of the pain originated. In Oct she spent two weeks in hospital dosed up on morphine, not able to walk far and barely eating or drinking.
She began palliative Capox chemotherapy and 3 days after her first IV, she was able to swallow, by the end of the first 3 weeks she no longer had her main symptom of feeling full, was pain free and could eat and drink *almost* normally, obviously I remain terrified all the time but it was a relief to see her enjoying time with my children and eating like a horse at Christmas! She is such a fighter and so determined, she’s even raised over £1k for Cancer Research by walking 62 miles in January, she’s keeping on track and even walked 2 miles after chemo, she is my hero!
She is not a candidate for immunotherapy, although private genetic testing has identified potential future targeted treatment and she will receive bone strengthening injections which the oncologist seems pretty convinced will keep the bone metastasis under control.
Back to my question and the tiny glimmer of hope I’m searching for… I looked through her blood work and found a tumour marker test called ‘Serum CA 19-9’, pre-chemo level was 28,588 (incredibly high from what I gather), at the end of her first treatment cycle, it was 4,814 (still very high), a drop of over 80%. My question is, do any of you have any experience of this and should we allow ourselves to feel cautiously hopeful in any way for the mid point scans to show a reduction in tumour burden? We plan to seek an opinion from The Marsden once all results from genetic tests and mid point scan is done.
Thank you for reading xx
