Lady K had a cat scan today to see if her eye cancer had spread. It tends to spread to and from the liver and lungs.
Her liver is clean, and they found a couple small spots in her lungs which they say are probably benign and nothing to worry about, but which they will keep an eye on just in case – and if it is cancer, it’s early enough to stop it before it gets started.
So essentially this is as positive a prognosis as one could hope for, especially since her eye tumor is a rare type of cancer (perhaps 2.5 cases in a million) and is aggressive.
So Friday they are going to partially pop out her eyeball, sew a small curved radioactive bead containing 21 radioactive seeds to the rear left side of her left eye, pop her eyeball back in, sew the conjunctiva closed (the mucous membrane that covers the front of the eye and lines the inside of the eyelids) and keep her isolated in a hospital room for three nights, then remove the radioactive bead Monday morning and send her home.
At some point in the next three weeks, the stitches will dissolve and her eye will open again. She’ll wear an eye patch until then.
Doc says her prognosis for killing the tumor is 95-97%. Since there’s no known cancer elsewhere, her outlook is good, and they’ll keep monitoring her monthly for 6 months then yearly through five years to see if it springs up elsewhere.
It’s lousy to get cancer, but since she has it, this is as good an initial prognosis as possible.
This will make two cancer survivors in our family. We did lose a third family member to intestinal cancer – our cat Mandy.
future hope – Lady’s 7 month-old niece Liberty Lynn Green