The past year

After the ileostomy reversal, the cancer started coming back pretty strong. We did a few rounds of irreneocetan. It seemed to work at first but petered out pretty quickly after just a couple rounds. I lost all my hair. It's pretty "classic" chemo. No hair, nausea. weak. After that, our Doc in Texas suggested we might be able to do some additional radiation. The scans did not show any big, obvious tumor masses, but we suspected that the remaining cancer was in my hip, where they were not able to get the best margins during the surgery. Also on the PET scan, that area looked a little "warm" (not a definite "hot" though). So we decided to do 2-3 rounds of Oxiplaintan (which it's been years since I did it, and maybe it will work again) and then try radiation on the hip. So, we get to Texas (after a very nice vacation in Norway), and the new scans show that the cancer might be in my prostate. WTF. So our "plan" goes out the window and we try to come up with a new one. We do a couple biopsies to see if we can find it. One comes back negative (no cancer) but they are not sure from the description if it's the hip ne, or the prostate one. WTF. We don't know shit, so I fly home after days of frustration. I get home and they think the prostate one IS positive, but after reading the detailed description, it looks like there is a chance, they the tissue they grabbed may be intestine tissue and not cancer tissue. More questions.
Meanwhile, I'm starting to get symptoms that look more and more like cancer. It's getting more difficult to pee. It had been very gradually getting worse and we didn't know if it was scar tissue, radiation effects, or what. Taking longer to pee. Not feeling like I was getting everything out. My Charleston doc & I thought we needed to get urorology involved. They wanted to run a bunch of tests before seeing me (fair enough - let's get this figured out).