The results came in
I got the results today.
Not in a phone call. Not in a quiet room with a careful preamble. The way I always get them — through the portal, in the middle of an otherwise normal afternoon, while the rest of my day waited for me to decide whether to keep reading or close the tab and come back later.
I kept reading.
The CT abdomen and pelvis was performed on March 6. The report was finalized today, March 13. Comparison: the February 6 scan. Clinical history: clinical trial tumour measurements, assess response to treatment, week six.
Here is what it says, translated out of radiology and into something closer to the language I live in:
The hepatic metastatic deposits — the liver lesions that have occupied the centre of every scan conversation since this chapter began — were measured again. Four of them tracked across the same segments and compared millimetre by millimetre against the last set of images.
Segment 8: 3.6 cm. Previously 3.5.
Segment 8, posterior: 2.0 cm. Previously 2.1.
Segment 8/4 at the dome: 1.8 cm. Previously 1.9.
Segment 5/6: 1.3 cm. Previously 1.2.
And the conclusion — the line I read three times before I let myself absorb it:
Stable hepatic metastatic disease. No new or progressive size of disease in the abdomen/pelvis.
No new disease. No progression. No lymphadenopathy. No peritoneal deposits. No ascites. No bone metastases.
Stable.
What precision owns this space
I have written before about the difference between comfort and precision. About how the mind under stress reaches for the version of a scan that is easiest to carry, and how that version is not always the one the radiologist actually wrote. I have written about the way a single growing lesion can hijack the entire emotional register of an otherwise controlled scan. I have written about the urge to act, to hit, to intervene — and about the harder discipline of restraint.
So let me be precise now, because precision is what I owe this space.
The dominant lesion in segment 8 — the one that grew from 2.5 cm at baseline to 3.4 cm in February, the one that made me book Tokyo and lose sleep and write thousands of words about the tension between instinct and medicine — grew another millimetre. From 3.5 to 3.6.
One millimetre.
That is not the same trajectory as before.
In the first interval, November to February, it went from 2.5 to 3.4. That was nearly a centimetre of growth in roughly ten weeks. That was the scan that rattled me. That was the scan that made the word “stable” feel like a lie dressed in clinical language.
This time, over a comparable interval, it moved one millimetre. The growth rate changed. Whatever was accelerating appears, at minimum, to have slowed.
Meanwhile, two of the other tracked lesions actually shrank — by a millimetre each. And the fourth grew by one. The net picture, when you step back from the millimetre-by-millimetre accounting, is something that genuinely earns the word in the conclusion.
Stable.
Not shrinking. Not dramatic. Not the scan I fantasize about in my better moments, the one where the radiologist writes something that lets me exhale for a month.
But stable.
And I need to let that land.
The number that doesn’t match the picture
There is a part of my brain — the strategic part, the part that reads these reports like battle damage assessments — that immediately wants to qualify the result. Wants to note that the CEA is still climbing. It went from 71.1 in early February to 77.2 in mid-February to 95.3 at the beginning of March. That a rising tumour marker alongside stable imaging creates a tension that is hard to resolve cleanly. The numbers are moving in one direction while the pictures hold still.
I notice that part of my brain. I do not silence it. It is doing its job.
But I also notice something else.
The scan that I feared — the one I spent the last six weeks bracing for, the one I wrote about in Tokyo, the one that lived in my imagination as a catastrophe waiting to be confirmed — did not arrive.
What arrived was a scan that says the treatment is doing enough to hold the line.
What containment actually means
Not cure. Not remission. Not an even response, in the dramatic sense of that word.
Containment.
And containment, in this disease, at this stage, on this trial, is not nothing. Containment is the whole point of what GSK-5764227 is being asked to do right now. Hold. Maintain. Keep the architecture from collapsing while the drug does whatever it is capable of doing at the molecular level.
I can work with containment.
I have built routines around containment. I have walked thousands of steps inside containment. I have eaten structured meals and fasted on schedule and maintained my weight and kept my albumin at 43 and my liver enzymes normal — all inside containment.
Containment is not resignation. Containment is the foundation you pour while you wait for better options, better data, or better luck.
What I’m still waiting on
I should also note what the chest CT did not show — or rather, what I’m still waiting on. The abdomen and pelvis report came in today. The chest report from the same session has not yet been finalized. The February chest scan had flagged a new 2 mm nodule in the left upper lobe, described as nonspecific, requiring surveillance. I expect the new report will address whether that nodule is still there, whether it has changed, and whether it remains beneath the threshold of concern.
I will write about that when I have it.
For now, I am sitting with the abdomen and pelvis result, which is the scan that matters most in terms of the metastatic disease that defines my clinical picture.
The thing I most need to say
There is a version of this post I could have written that is pure analysis. All numbers, all comparisons, all CEA trajectories plotted against tumour measurements in a table that would satisfy the part of me that wants to understand this disease like a system.
I thought about writing that post.
But the truth is, the thing I most need to say today is simpler than that.
I was afraid. I was afraid this scan would show clear progression. I was afraid the trial would end. I was afraid the growing lesion would keep growing at the rate it had been growing, and that the conversation at my next appointment would shift from treatment to transition.
That did not happen.
What happened instead is that the disease held still enough — barely, imperfectly, but measurably — for the word “stable” to appear at the bottom of the report.
And stable is not a feeling. Stable is not comfort. Stable does not make me sleep better or worry less or stop checking MyChart at two in the morning.
But stable is a measurement.
And right now, in this phase of this fight, a measurement I can trust is worth more than a feeling I cannot.
I’ll take it.
Next: blood draw, March 18, clinic visit the same day, and the conversation about what comes next.