So How Much Cancer Was There?

During the last couple of weeks, you’ve learned a few things -- my surgery was successful, I’m officially in remission, and I’m recovering in record time. What you don’t know is what Dr. Sugarbaker encountered when he opened up my abdomen. How much cancer did the brilliant surgeon actually “pick out”?

Lots. Like, a scary amount.

Let me tell you, dear readers, your pal WunderGlo had a ridiculous amount of cancer in the ol’ body. Despite feeling strong and healthy in all of the days leading up to my surgery date, there was an extensive amount of disease lingering in my body. A thousand baby tumors on my small intestines, cancer in my belly button and spleen and gall bladder and right ovary, and even a tumor in my rectum. In 11 hours of surgery, Dr. Sugarbaker performed 17 different procedures to get me cancer-free. It’s clear why Dr. Ramos freaked out the first time he witnessed the extent of the peritoneal disease in my body. “The cancer” was no joke.

I remember the doctors initially telling me about “the cancer” that inhabited my body. They described it as “very aggressive.” I just smiled and said, “Well, I’m very aggressive, too.” As it turns out, they were right. “The cancer” was very aggressive, and had run rampant. Luckily, I was right, too. Despite the extensive amount of disease in my abdominal cavity, when Dr. Sugarbaker sliced me open and took a look at it, he found that a substantial amount of it was dead. Dead as a doornail. So annihilated that Dr. Sugarbaker noted that he’d never seen cancer so white, calcified, and dead-looking. In 40 years, he’d never seen such dead cancer. He noted that, had the chemo that Dr. Lenz administered to me not worked as brilliantly as it had, the surgery probably would not have been successful (as in, there would’ve been too much disease to “pick out”).

That means that all that cancer-killing I was talking about over the past couple of months was 1) actually happening, 2) was happening in grand fashion, 3) played a large role in saving my life.

I believed in my brilliant Dr. Lenz, the chemo cocktail he gave me every two weeks, and my body’s powerful ability to destroy cancer while remaining healthy during the entire chemo process. And it all worked out. Pretty miraculous, I’d say.