If you scroll thru the rectal cancer board, you'll see other postings.
My best friend is now about 5 weeks after ileostomy reversal, and I must say that this has turned out to be at least as hard for him as having the ileostomy. I keep encouraging him to remember that his "equipment" is new, and to remember how hard it was to get our babies, back in the alst millennium, trained so they had some comtrol, which I think is fair. Even so, and despite his generally optimistic nature, I think he's bored with staying at home and, among many other things, wants to go back to work. Alas, until he's on some kind of predictable "schedule" I don't think that will be possible. And predicting a "schedule" for something like this is WAY beyond my prognosticational capabilities. My best, brightest guess would be "soon" but after that, I refuse to make a forecast.
In about three weeks, he's scheduled for a followup PET scan, and I suspect still more blood tests, to figure out the next step. Here is the sequence he's seen, so far:
1. DX with stage IV, a little over a year ago. His tumor wasn't resectable, and he had "mets" to liver, other spots in colon, pancreas.
2. 6 months of Folfox 6, which converted him to resectable, and killed off most of the rest, but not all.
3. Surgery to cut it the main tumor and a few more spots, , which left him with an ileostomy
4. 5 weeks of 5X a week radiation.
5. Ileostomy reversal.
Unfortunately, after the last round of blood tests, including a CEA test, they found that we still haven't killed it off, completely. My guess is that he'll have to do some more chemo. The excellent news is that there's still chemo to give him.
I know that this sounds hard, but the fact is that as recently as 5 years ago, someone DX'd this far along would barely have been treatable. As it is, we beat the cancer back to the point where we could cut it out. Score one for the good guys. We beat it back some more with radiation. Score two for the good guys. He got to have an ileostomy reversal, which wouldn't have been possible, based on where the tumor was located, as recently as three years ago. Score three for the good guys.
And there's still things left to do.
Hope remains possible. Hope is always possible, but it won't arrive all shiny and bright on your doorstep. You need to go out and look. This board is a pretty good place.