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  High Level Process Update I’m sorry so much time has passed since I last wrote, but here is a short summary: Systemic treatment is ongoing and has been fairly effective, but not enough to prevent slow and steady disease progression. As an indicator of cancerous activity, the CEA blood test has trended from 3 to 13 over the past year. Not extremely bad, but not good enough. Efforts to surgically remove tumors in the liver and lungs went well, but new ones have grown back in their places according to PET scans, which are in agreement with CEA trends. My oncologist’s interpretation is that this is par for the course for stage IV. We can try going back and forth between pulling “weeds” and using “herbicide” (metaphor for surgery and chemotherapy). But ultimately we don’t have a good enough ways to kill all the “seeds,” and we can only pull "weeds" so many times without impairing function of critical organs (lungs, liver). He told me from the beginning that he wasn't expecti...