On the day of the second opinion, I told the head of the surgery department that I wanted to be transferred to his hospital, and he arranged an appointment with the internal medicine department for the following week.
On the first day of my diagnosis with Dr. I, the internal medicine doctor, he told me that my blood test value for liver had deteriorated significantly while looking at the X-rays and blood test results taken that day. Dr. I explained that there were some shadows on my liver, but they did not seem to be cancer metastases, so he wanted to hospitalize me immediately and start treatment, including treatment for that possibility. However, there was a possibility that it had metastasized to the liver, and he honestly explained the difficulty of stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and that surgery is necessary to completely cure pancreatic cancer, that surgery is not possible if the cancer has metastasized to stage 4. He also told me that in his past experience he had thought there was no metastasis and decided to undergo surgery, but then metastasis to the liver was discovered later.
I was hospitalized that day, and that night from my hospital bed I announced on Facebook that I had been hospitalized with pancreatic cancer. This was the right decision that proved to be extremely helpful in my subsequent battle with pancreatic cancer.
At that time, all I knew from online information was that stage 4 pancreatic cancer has a 5-year survival rate of 1.2% to 1.6%.
Moreover, when I searched the internet for information about cancer, I was inundated with a huge amount of mixed information, and it was hard to distinguish what was true and what was false, so I didn’t know what to believe.
It would be tough to get through this on my own when facing such a tough opponent, so I wanted the support of my friends, and I was sure that some of my friends were cancer survivors, so I wanted advice from them, and this was the right decision.
Not only did I receive messages of support from nearly 300 friends overnight, but I also received advice from friends who are cancer survivors, which I have compiled below.
– Stay positive and optimistic.
– Enjoy daily life more than ever before.
– Do what you want to do to the fullest.
– Keep moving your body properly.
– Eat, eat, and eat, no matter how painful the anti-cancer drugs are.
After that, I researched pancreatic cancer on the Internet, and after a week I finally found information from pancreatic cancer survivors and pancreatic cancer specialists who seemed trustworthy. The information I got the day after I posted on Facebook was exactly what those pancreatic cancer survivors and specialists were saying.
After that, I learned the importance of muscle training for cancer patients, and thanks to the support I received from Facebook, I was not only able to continue my muscle training every day, but I was also able to move forward with my cancer treatment in a positive way so that I could meet friends I had not been in contact with for decades. For me, Facebook became a very important and useful medium in my fight against cancer.
On the second day after hospitalization, my condition suddenly worsened. I was feeling perfectly fine until I woke up and did morning exercises, but after shopping at the store in the hospital and walking back to my hospital room, I suddenly felt sick, and by the time I crawled to my hospital room, I was writhing in bed due to severe pain in my abdomen. I pressed the nurse call button and many doctors and nurses rushed over, and they put in a suppository, which somehow made the pain go away, but it was the most excruciating pain I’ve ever experienced in my life.
By the way, this was the pain caused by pus clogging the bile duct, which caused it to become blocked. The pain of bile duct blockage is said to be one of the three most severe pains a human can experience, and I felt a little bleak about the future when I thought that if I had pancreatic cancer, I would have to live with this pain from now on. However, I kept reading over and over the messages of my friends on Facebook, and though the pain was intense I told myself that I could manage it because the pain would go away just by putting in a suppository, and that I shouldn’t whine because I had just declared on Facebook that I would fight cancer with a positive attitude.
When I had endoscopy that day, it was found that the bile duct stent was clogged with pus, so they inserted two bile duct stents and inserted a thin tube into the bile duct stent through my nose so that the pus could be sucked out. The tube extending from the bile duct stent was left connected to a plastic bag for putting pus through the esophagus and nose all day so that it could be removed from the body if it came out. Then, twice a day, morning and evening, saline was injected with a syringe to wash and suck out the pus that had accumulated in the bile duct stent. In the first few days, a surprising amount of pus came out. Doctor thought that the shadow on the liver was probably just this pus, and so he continued the treatment for about 10 days. At the same time, he was given an intravenous drip of antibiotics for two weeks. Having a tube running from my nose to my throat all the time made my throat feel a bit itchy and uncomfortable, but other than that, I was in good health and the doctor told me that it would be better for me to exercise while I was hospitalized, so I spent two weeks leading a healthy lifestyle, doing muscle training every day, walking around the ward, and going up and down the stairs in the ward. The pus coming out of the nasal tube disappeared within a week, and by the time two weeks of intravenous antibiotics were finished, the blood test results had stabilized and it was decided that it would be okay to start anticancer drug.
In my case, the size of the cancer in my pancreas is equivalent to stage 2B. In the case of pancreatic cancer, if it is stage 4 and there is metastasis, surgery is impossible, so in that case, anticancer drug is performed, and if the metastasis disappears, surgery is possible. Even in the case of stage 2B without metastasis, the current standard treatment is to perform anticancer drug for two months before surgery, so in either case, we planned to start anticancer drug first, but at the same time, Dr. I decided that there was a possibility that the shadow on my liver was not a metastasis of cancer, so we decided to first take a CT scan to confirm.
If the shadow still remained on my liver after a series of hospitalization treatments for liver inflammation, the shadow would be considered cancer, so it would be stage 4 with metastasis to the liver, and if the shadow on the liver have disappeared, the cancer had not metastasized to the liver, so it would be stage 2B, which would be curable by surgery.
I was anxiously waiting for the results of the CT scan, which would make a big difference in my future treatment, but I was really relieved when I saw Dr. I running down the ward corridor with a big smile on his face and saying, “Hiro-san, the shadow has disappeared.”
Although the surgery was now able to take place without any problems, first I would need to undergo two months of outpatient anticancer drug. My work schedule was set to be extremely busy in January, the month after he was discharged from the hospital, so that I was anxious about whether I would be able to properly carry out my duties while undergoing anticancer drug, and whether it was really ok to schedule work around it, as my anticancer drug was about to begin.