Ray’s Blog

The good news is that my oncologist knows what happened to me. The bad news is what it is. It’s what we had suspected, a rare adverse reaction to 5-FU called cardiotoxicity. Although that’s somewhat misleading. Cardiotoxicity actually means heart muscle damage which we don’t believe has occurred in my case but is possible. In fact, you can drop dead from cardiac arrest when given 5-FU. Now we know I am at risk, meaning I can have an adverse reaction again, if I follow the standard chemotherapy treatment, in any form including a heart attack. My dilemma is that I need the chemo to have the best chance for surviving cancer but the treatment could kill me. So we will have to make a choice - risk now for increased survival later or play it safe now and risk having cancer later (later meaning within the next five years). more…