How early was your cancer caught - any stage 0 or 1 experiences?

Mine was also stage 4 because it had spread to some lymph nodes … had a pet scan last week will get results tomorrow crossing fingers for good news

My wife also has stage 4 esophageal adenocarcinoma. She’s had 8 rounds of Folfox and has just started Opdivo. Her next scan won’t be until late October. The latest scan showed a 35% reduction in her liver tumors but her liver enzymes are highly elevated. Taking it day by day. All of our plans have been blown to bits

Same here Michael. This really throws a monkey in the mix. I already had Chronic Lymphatic Leukemia (CLL) that that the VA found in late 2022. That cancer is supper slow and I most likely would have died from something else before the CLL killed me. FYI, I'm a huge fan of Dark Humor. I will beat this cancer but I'll be making fun of it and me the whole time. Every treatment will be unique since we're all different people. They started me on both drugs at the same time two weeks ago. I got my 2nd cycle yesterday, heck I still have the take home infusion pump hooked up. The doc's said that I was PD-L1 at 1% that they started me on immunotherapy this cycle. Sorry I don't know the name of it. Bill, did you get your PET scan results? Why is it mostly good news and then bad news with cancer? At my appointment with my oncologist the day before my 2nd cycle there was good news. My symptoms from the 1st cycle were mild, I was a good candidate for the immunotherapy and thing were looking up. Then yesterday, they figure out that because of my CLL, the machines that do the blood work the stats can't read my blood cells correctly because the CLL messes a whole bunch of the cells up for counting by a machine. Oh sorry I'm doing text to speech now so I'll be a little bit more long-winded and they'll be more typos but hell we got cancer typos are minor. :), so this means that a pathologist has manually count the cells, and this takes hours... and it means I can do the treatment on Mondays so that hopefully I wouldn't be crappy on the weekends. Then the attending oncologist comes in and says that I'm not recovering enough bone marrow between cycles and they may have to cut the chemo drugs that I'm getting and that some of my white blood cell markers are right a the threshold for treatment. Remember, the only easy day was yesterday. Say this mantra to yourself: "Most people find this difficult, but for me, it's easy." Fight the good fight!

The pet scan came back as showing no concerning activity so there really wasn’t much lighting up so they have decided to give me a break from treatment for awhile to see what happens… so we shall see

Thank you for sharing your journey and asking such an important question about early detection. While many community members here have different stages of diagnosis, hearing from those who caught it at stage 0 or 1 can provide valuable insights about symptoms and screening experiences. Your quick timeline from first symptoms to diagnosis shows how rapidly things can progress, and starting treatment promptly is what matters most right now. Hoping others will share their early detection stories to help answer your question and provide different perspectives on this disease.