The doctor's office just called. I'm not happy about the news.

Most of you will remember my horrible liver surgery back in '04 when they took out a quarter of my liver due to tumors that were caused by the estrogen in my birth control pills. When we decided to have a child, I consulted my liver specialist. He warned me that being pregnant elevates the estrogen in my system and the tumors had a possibilty of coming back even in the short time of the pregnancy. We decided to risk it anyway and were blessed with Riley.

During the last month of the pregnancy, 4 small tumors appeared. When I had an MRI in January after Riley was born and it showed the tumors had grown to about quarter size. The doctor advised me at that time to do nothing. He wanted to do another MRI in July after my body had a chance to recover and see if they tumors had gotten any smaller. He told me that there was a good chance that my liver would regenerate itself and make the tumors smaller.

I had my follow up MRI on 7/12. They called me today to let me know that the tumors had not gotten smaller. They haven't gotten larger. The doctor is recommending I have a laser surgery procedure to burn the tumors off my liver. My options at this point are either this surgery that he's recommending or waiting another 6 months to see if my body can heal the tumors. He tells me that the chance of them healing are now very small since there hadn't been any progress in the last 6 months. He also tells me that there is a chance that they will get larger if I wait and if they get larger then I'll be forced to go through the same surgery I went through in '04.

My gut says "keep the surgery away!!!". My brain says "it's smarter to have the laser surgery than to risk the worse surgery".

The doctor told me to think about it and he'll contact me in 3-4 weeks when he gets back from a conference. The conference he's going to is going to discuss some new procdures for these kind of tumors so the doc wants to take my films with him and discuss my case with the guys presenting the new options and see if there is a better way to approach this.

I hope there is a better way.