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Wow, Leonard.  The original poster lost his wife to bile duct cancer, and you give him grief because he misidentifies intrahepatic hilar cholangiocarcinoma as the same thing as a Klatskin's tumor?  Or were you upset by his use of the word "cure" in the same sentence as CCA?  There was nothing inaccurate in his description of orthotopic liver transplantation with neoadjuvant chemo-radiation as an effective treatment for CCA, so that can't be what raised your ire.

 

My only quibble would be that he didn't note that only a small percentage of CCA patients are candidates for transplant due to exclusion criteria (metastases, lymph node involvement, tumor size and number, etc.).  Even so, I agree with him that anyone who hasn't already been excluded from the transplant protocol should contact the hospitals that perform them to see whether they might qualify.  They have nothing to lose by doing so.

 

I myself am now almost two and a half years out from transplant, and all my scans post-tx have been clean (knock wood).  Do I still worry about the possibility of recurrence?  Of course, but the likelihood of it happening continues to decrease over time.  Other opportunistic cancers, like those of the skin and colon, are starting to concern me more since the immunosuppressant drugs that I have to take make me more susceptible to them.

 

I think you owe Honolulu an apology, Leonard.

If it were me, I would go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.  Their protocols for the treatment of cholangiocarcinoma seem to be the ones that other hospitals follow, and they treat a lot of patients with it.  With no metastases, you would be a candidate for transplant if the tumor could be shrunk first with chemo and radiation.  Best wishes.

I had a one-centimeter liver tumor imaged by CT scan in June of last year shortly after cholangiocarcinoma was diagnosed in both my intrahepatic ducts via ERCP brushings.  I was told that this is considered "small," but that size really doesn't matter.  [Where have I heard that before?]  The cancer cells in the ducts were what mattered, since they were going to metasticize elsewhere, and quickly.  The tumor might, too, but my docs weren't nearly as concerned about it as they were about what was found in the ERCP brushings.

I wasn't a candidate for surgical resection like your wife since both of my ducts were involved.  However, due to the small size of the tumor and the lack of mets anywhere else, I was a candidate for orthotopic liver transplant, which I received 8 months ago yesterday.  All of the CT scans that I've had subsequently including one about a month ago have been negative for cancer.  Have your wife's doctors discussed doing any chemo/radiation prior to surgery?  I had a five-week course prior to mine, as it is required before transplant.  If your wife's surgery is only two weeks away, then maybe there'd be no benefit to it, but if there's going to be any significant delay then I would think they'd want to do something to keep the cancer at bay in the interim.

Best wishes to you and your wife.