I think her medical team is doing the right stuff she’s just not conveying it or it’s going through some denial washing machine before it gets to us. She’s saying they wanted to wait but if she is stage three I don’t know if I believe that. If she’s stage four, then I might believe her when she says they want to wait, but she’s not saying it’s stage four. I’m going from what I know about colorectal cancer as someone in remission, what the surgeon said about her surgery, and the implications of chemo/radiation not reducing the tumor.
In terms of her scans, we know the tumor is still there so “clear” probably means it hasn’t spread although the tumor remains unchanged. It has to come out or will metastasize and become inoperable again. Even without metastasizing, her tumor is already so invasive that waiting at all doesn’t fly with a stage three status. She also mentioned mucin, which means she could have a
MAC, and it doesn’t show well on PET scans. There’s so much that’s being left out but we DO know she didn’t have the T4B tumor removed, so it is practically a ticking time bomb.
If I had to guess, I would say the surgeon and the team were originally going to try surgery to give Tiffany a good chance of curative treatment but it’s possible they now believe it won’t have the intended effect, and she’ll become stage four either way. I think what surprised him is the mucin in the biopsies and if it’s MAC, it’s a completely different beast than what he was prepared for. it would also explain why she didn’t respond to chemotherapy and radiotherapy very well.
If he truly wants to wait I would suspect it’s something related to this, but if he didn’t want to wait and she’s just saying he did, then she might’ve passed her only opportunity for surgery. Her surgeon is incredible so I don’t think he would suggest waiting in any universe if he thought urgent surgery would save her life. Sadly, I think it’s about quality not quantity, and that’s reflected in Tiffany repeating those words as well as the mental health referrals.