Seeing Santa

We went to see Father Christmas this morning to check the wound and to get the pathology.

The burning questions were:

1. Is the wound OK?
2. What type and grade is the kidney cancer?
3. What did the lymph nodes show?
4. What about these speckles on the lungs?

Generally, the meeting was very encouraging. Of course everything comes with caveats but from what we understood:

1. He is not worried about the wound.
2. The kidney cancer is grade 3 (out of 4). It is "not the most aggressive type". Apparently there was very little chance of it being 1 or 2, so this is good news. It is a conventional clear cell type - the most common sort. The kidney stage is 3 (out of 4) as he expected - having spread into the renal vein, it could not have been 1 or 2.
3. Of the 9 lymph nodes he removed, there were small deposits in one and it was one of the ones closest to the kidney (hilar lymph node) so, to use Father Xmas's terminology we have got it at the first hurdle. This means it is less likely to have spread elsewhere although they can't say that for certain.
4. The speckles on the lungs are very small (At one point he said "I can barely see them"), but most noticable on the left side. We really can't tell anything about them until we get another CT scan and compare whether they have grown. There is even a chance that they aren't tumour deposits, although it is "high on the list of possibilities".

I won't go into every question we asked (there were quite a few!) but a couple of other points of note were:

• Life expectancy - we are talking years not months. It is very variable and depends on the rate of growth of the spots and the response to treatment. One man whose spots at this stage were bigger than Quent's is still alive 12 years later. Also there are new treatments appearing all the time - see below.
• The smaller the spots, the easier it is for the immune system to attack it (& hence more chance of immunotherapy being successful).
• In taking out the kidney, they have removed 99.5% of the cancer detectable at this stage.
• There is a new drug - serafanib - which is having good results and can be tried after the immunotherapy.
• In the waiting room, we picked up today's Daily Mail and read the headline "Vaccine for kidney and bowel cancers within 3 years" . Whilst The Daily Mail is hardly the BMJ, it makes very encouraging reading and seemed to be a clear example of the hope that I and so many of you have been praying for.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=416006&in_page_id=1770

All in all, a great meeting and we are now heading out for lunch on the river. As Father Christmas concluded "everything depends on the next couple of scans" which will take place in a month or so.

I would like to thank everyone with all my heart for your best wishes, prayers, crossed fingers and positive vibes. It is so comforting to us to know that we are fighting this en masse. So many of you have asked how you can help. Rest assured you are already helping, because we get great strength from the love that streams from the blog comments, emails, cards and letters.

I think Lord Blog will be onto me for verbosity if I don't stop now. More about immunotherapy tomorrow - when we see the wonderfully named Dr Savage.