I met with my surgeon today to go over the pathology — the final read on everything they cut out of me during the CRS+HIPEC surgery two weeks ago. Best news the report could have carried.

Start with the lesions first found back in November. Chemo shrank them so far that my last scans showed nothing at all — a complete imaging response. But not visible was never the same as gone. The surgeon took them out, and pathology confirmed what we already assumed: cancer, every one of them. That's the expected result, and it's the whole argument against treating a clean scan as a cure. The dandelions were still in the lawn.

The part that could have gone either way: a handful of millimeter-sized deposits on my small intestine. Malignant, and my PCI — the score for how far the disease has spread across the abdomen — would climb from 5 to 7. They came back benign. It holds at 5. Low.

The omentum came back benign too — the fatty apron over the intestines, and a favorite place for cancer cells to get caught and settle in. They took mine out as a matter of course. Clean.

I don't think I could have asked for a better outcome from this surgery.

The peritoneum, the lining where my cancer set up shop, is the reason for all of it: disease that settles there doesn't respond well to chemo alone, because drugs in the bloodstream don't reach it efficiently. That's what HIPEC is for — heated chemo run straight through the abdomen to kill what's too small to cut out.

CRS+HIPEC still carries a serious recurrence rate — the large studies put it around 80%. I'm not looking away from that. But a low PCI, a complete cytoreduction, benign results where it counted, and a body that answered the chemo by shrinking the disease clean off the scans — that's the profile you want walking into those odds. I'm optimistic the HIPEC did its job.

Not visible doesn't mean gone. I've earned that caution. But today, the report said what I needed it to say.