Need some prayers for my dad...

pepebcn said:

last year whilst switched to folfox cea was going up
but mets were in real and big regression! not cea on proper
levels until operated 0.6!
have feith and you will see!
hope been useful!
Pepe

CherylHutch said:

No need to panic at this point
Ok, I'm no doctor, nor do I play one on TV or on the Support Boards. I'm not sure I'm following your information here and I don't know the history of your father's journey, so I'm just taking a wild guess at what you have said above

If I understand this right, your dad has been on chemo treatments for a year or so... pretty consistently. Around the beginning of the year, his CEA was a nice 1.6 reading, but now, in August, it is 5.6 which indicates an upwards trend. Since he has been on chemo consistently for over a year, it's not as if he was starting a new chemo plan or had been on a break and started the chemo again. According to his scans, they are showing that the tumours you know about are decreasing, shrinking in size (this is a good thing), yet the CEA is still going up.

Now, you say the doctor wants to rescan after 2 treatments... but you didn't say what kind of scan he/she wants to do. Is this a CT scan of the tumours they know about or is this a PET scan, which would be scanning the whole body from neck to knees on the molecular level? Those are two totally different scans that can give totally different information. If he wants to do a CT scan, then my "guess" (keeping in mind, everything I say here is purely speculation and guessing on my part), is that he wants to get a clear picture of how these tumours that you already know about are really doing, with just two more treatments since the last scan. If it is a PET scan, then he/she is wanting to check the whole body to see if there is any kind of indication of fast growing cell activity anywhere in the body. This would include the tumours you already know about, but he would be checking to see if the rising CEA is indicating there is some cell activity elsewhere in the body.

At this stage, there is nothing to panic over because other than the tumours you already know about and they seem to be being stable or shrinking, you don't have anything else to worry about. IF there is some new growth somewhere else (and this is a big IF), then it might be something as simple as redoing the kind of chemo he's getting to add something that will go after the new growth. Or maybe there is some other kind of treatment. But one can't even begin to start discussing treatments, surgeries, or any other possibilities until one knows what they are dealing with. For all we know, if he does get a PET scan, they might find nothing else, and all this uproar is over a CEA reading which isn't the most reliable marker for everyone.

So... no panic. Calm down. Have a nice cuppa 'tea and just take it one step at a time. Each time he has a scan, a blood test, or anything else, that's all it is... one step to add more info that the doctors can analyze and determine what the best treatment is

Cheryl