Hi all – this is Charles. We arrived at St. Luke’s at 7:30 this morning. Hilary was in good spirits (although tired). Fun pre-op picture with party hat is attached. She went into the OR at about 10:30am. I just talked with Dr. Curley a minute ago and the summary is:
All went well with the procedure and I’ll see her in recovery in about an hour. Dr. Curley took out the area of her liver that had looked suspicious on the scans. He also ablated (microwave radiation) one other small area that may have just been scar tissue, but it made sense to knock it out while he was in there. Dr. Curley again did ultrasound all around the area of Hilary’s liver and there were no other visible signs of cancer. All in, he took about 5% of her liver out this time, which should be much easier to recover from than the 60+% last time.
The pathologist looked at the tissue Dr. Curley removed and it was, as suspected, cholangiocarcinoma. So, it’s a good thing that we did the surgery and got it out. All detectable cancer has been removed, which is also a good thing! The next steps (after rest and recovery) will be to get results from the additional testing that we’ll have done on the removed tissue and to check in with Dr. Javle and again with Dr. Curley on what, if anything, needs to be done.
Thank you all again (and again and again) for your prayers, thoughts and well wishes. It really means more than you can know to our family to have your support.
Charles