Every year, barring developments that make me return sooner, I will have a series of annual surveillance tests at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. Last week was the first time since diagnosis that I’ve been on this yearly schedule and I was able to group all of the appointments together in one week. I flew down, stayed at the hotel on the Mayo campus, and knocked them all out.
Here’s what they found:
- Liver imaging and liver bloodwork was stable.
- My liver enzymes remain too low to qualify for clinical trials, so those are entirely off the table for now, which removes hassle but also the hope of trial drugs.
- My primary doctor was amenable to prescribing a statin and low-dose aspirin despite that my cardiac profile doesn’t warrant them. They’ve been shown in observational studies to reduce the risk of bile duct cancer by a fair amount. I’ll do a blood test from the road in 3 months to check how I’m doing on it.
- They found (and removed) a polyp and my Crohn’s results were mixed.
- My terminal ileum appeared visually healed from where the Crohn’s was first fund, but the doctor did not take a biopsy so we don’t really know the full story on the tissue architecture
- My colon showed inflammation, which is a new development and if it is Crohn’s, that places me in a group of PSC-IBD patients with a higher risk for cancer.
- But the inflammation was mild and perhaps due to other factors, such as intolerance I experienced to the low residue, highly processed foods the week prior and perhaps due to the prep itself.
- They want me to stay on my current are medication and come back in a year.
So that’s it. For the first time since diagnosis, I have a year wide open without medical appointments.
It’s kind of surreal.