8th April 2019 - Finally some good news!!!

After a week of huge ups and downs, I finally got to the day of the scans. The first scan I did was an MRI of the liver. It took more than one hour and I was wearing headphones so that I could follow instructions on whether I should breathe or hold my breath. Given the claustrophobic environment of an MRI machine, holding your breath for up to 20 seconds is not exactly a walk in the park. My coping mechanism was to always keep my eyes shut so that I could picture myself in a different, more spacious, environment.

The CT scan was much easier to deal with – it only lasted a few minutes and, shortly after I was allowed to go.

The rest of the day was uneventful but I was dreading the consultation with the oncologist, which was planned for the following day at 4pm. I remember chatting to Jane after dinner, with the kids in the living room watching a TV programme, and telling her that I felt extremely pessimistic due to all the bad data I had received up to that point.

Jane was trying her best to calm me down, but ultimately we both thought that the best we could hope for, given the evolution of the CA19-9 marker, was that the therapy had stabilised the cancer. And we both agreed that there was a significant risk that we would be told that the cancer had spread further. The prospect of dying very soon was very much in my mind that evening.

As we were having this very conversation, I checked my phone and noticed that I had just received a text message from my oncologist. The message read:

“Hi Andrea, I have seen your CT and MRI. I wanted to let you know there has been a good response to chemo with a 50% reduction in the size of many liver metastases and good reduction in the size of the pancreas tumour too. Good news. See you tomorrow.”

For the first time since the day of diagnosis, I cried.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been close to crying before. I had had tears in my eyes on several occasions, during some conversations with my parents and Jane in particular, but this time my tears were in free flow and they were of a different nature: they were tears of relief. It was the first good news in two months after what felt like an infinite stream of negative scans, biopsies and blood tests. And it was completely unexpected.

The realisation that my death may not be as imminent as I had feared immediately filled me with a new sense of hope and purpose. I had been diligently following my tough regime of eating, sleeping and exercising, but I felt I could do even more, and I felt a renewed motivation to do so.

Jane, like me, got very emotional about it. And I got the same reaction from my parents and sister when I called them to let them know.

All these calls taking place relatively late in the evening picked the curiosity of our children. Thomas came to me and asked:

“Daddy, how is it going with the therapy? Is there some news?”

Despite the fact that I had not disclosed to the children anything about my cancer apart from how I felt after each cycle and of course what I had told them on the day of diagnosis, I decided that it would be good to share the good news with them. And so I told them about the SMS I received, the shrinkage of the tumour and that everything was going according to plan (as they knew it) if not better.

They were obviously very pleased to hear this. But the effect of that revelation became incredibly obvious when, within one minute, Thomas, Alberto and Giorgio burst into peals of laughter about something so silly that I cannot even remember what it was. They laughed non-stop for ages – I found this exuberance so overwhelming that I almost burst into tears but managed to contain myself and to enjoy the moment.