Yesterday I met with various members of my care team at Fred Hutch, where I learned a key piece of good news: pathology results from my surgery have been analyzed, concluding that the margins are clean.

What does this mean? I’ll do my best to explain it, here, as I had no previous familiarity with this terminology. Basically, with a surgery that removes a cancerous tumor, the surgeon cuts out extra tissue that surrounds the tumor. The goal here is to ensure that there are clean margins fully surrounding the excised tumor. I found an image online that breaks this down. A positive (“unclean”) margin is bad news, which apparently can necessitate a followup surgery to cut more out.

Clean margins = surgery success: the cancerous tissue is considered fully removed. But, I asked yesterday, is this equivalent to NED (No Evidence of Disease)? No, they told me. They wouldn’t be able to declare me NED until my next set of scans (not sure, yet, when these will be).

I’m eager to confirm that NED date, honestly because in the colorectal cancer survivor community, everybody celebrates their NED anniversary. Certainly, in years hence, I want to be able to proclaim my NED anniversary as well!

But for the time being, I’ll gladly celebrate all of the information I do have. My last set of scans occurred just a few months ago, in late November. And according to those scans, there wasn’t cancer anywhere in my body, except for the tumor itself — which is now gone. At this time, there is no need for me to do any additional treatment. The big remaining step for me is the ileostomy reversal surgery, which is yet to be scheduled, but may potentially occur sometime in April. I learned yesterday that two diagnostic steps must occur before that surgery: a barium enema (yikes, doesn’t sound fun), and a sigmoidoscopy. They are working on getting those scheduled.

Was my surgery recovery process difficult? Yes, it had its challenges — especially in the first 2 1/2 weeks of recovery time.

Was chemo hard? Definitely.

Did I complain a lot throughout these treatment phases? Yep, just browse through past entries in this blog…

And was it all worth it? Absolutely. This is a no-brainer! These have all been critical steps in ensuring my lifespan is extended. I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to fully focus on the “three act play” of cancer treatment over the past nine months (Radiation, Chemo, Surgery), and am looking forward to shifting my focus to living a normal life, later this year.

Plenty more to share in this blog, though. I haven’t said much yet about life with an ostomy, and associated diet. Also, I’m honored to now be part of the planning committee for the Seattle Walk to end Colon Cancer — I’ll certainly have more to say on that topic in future posts. 🙂