1st Visit With Sergeon 1/31/12

We met with Dr Jon Oberg on 1/31/12 at his office in the Tanner Clinic.  We lined up a paritial laproscopic colonectomy for Monday February 6^th.  It will be early in the morning and will be further scheduled by Friday of this week.

Dr. Oberg talked with us about the cancer and how it was going to be removed.  He felt it was probably in the transverse section of the colon, but could not tell if it was at the top of the descending or ascending part of the colon.  He said this was extremely difficult even knowing the length that the monitor was inserted in the colonoscopy exam.

They will remove part of the colon and it ends up usually being a fairly large part of it depending on where the cancer is located.  They take the blood supply and lymph nodes associated with that part as well.  The lymph nodes are kept and tested after the surgery. 

He said that you cannot tell if the badness of the cancer from the size.  He has removed tumors much larger than the one Sheila has and the patient has been fine.  He also said that he had lost patients whose cancer was only as big as the end of the little finger.

At first they will go in with a scope and look at things, find where the cancer is, look for other problems.  Sometimes they can pull the colon out and the incision can be fairly small.  Other times the growth is hooked to other things and they have to do the old type of larger incision.

A CT Scan of the lower abdomen has been ordered and will be performed on Thursday.  This is a barium dye and since Sheila has had a slight allergy to the dye before she will be given some anti-allergy medication.

The results of the biopsies and the CT Scan should be available to Dr Oberg on Friday prior to Mondays surgery.  Currently we have no appointments set up to review the results of the tests.