Unfortunately

It's the wife reporting this time. Today in the afternoon Jan Arne had an appointment to have an ultrasound of the liver at the hospital, to figure out what was the cause of the elevated liver values. I left work in the middle of a meeting when Jan Arne sent me a message that the ultrasound was over and he was waiting for the doctor to give him the "verdict". The news was that something is blocking the bile ducts, and unfortunately considering his medical history and what the ultrasound was showing ("heterogeneous liver tissue") the most likely reason for this is that the metastases (tumours) have started to grow again and are maybe putting some pressure on the bile ducts and the bile can't get out of the liver. I hope I am getting this right, it was hard news to listen to and concentrate to listen to and translating this into English is not a piece of cake either right now.

The doc said the next step is to have the CT scan (Thursday, or is possible to squeeze it in , then tomorrow) and in the scan they will see more clearly the situation with the metastases. The scan is also needed by a doctor who will then hopefully later this week put in a stent to help the bile get out ("biliary stenting" it's called). The stent is needed as otherwise Jan Arne's condition will start to get worse little by little.

When we asked "and then" (if the stent works but the cancer is now growing) the doc said that the chemo route has been exhausted, so that's it, pretty much. They can try some radiation to make the tumours smaller. This sounded really bad as we thought there's some medication left they can try. Hopefully we get to talk to another doctor later this week and hear a "second opinion".

But let's just first wait for the CT scan results and the stenting operation.

We left the doctor's office to go pick up the kids from the daycare via pharmacy where Jan Arne got some medication to e.g. ease the itching caused by his condition.

So unfortunately not good news at all today, but I guess we have been still kind of ok. Or maybe we are in shock. Not quite sure how this works.