Hi Lizzy57

Welcome to Cancer Chat.

Sorry to hear about your partner and the stress you must both be feeling.

If you would like to call our nurses for advice, they would be happy to talk to you.

You can contact the team on freephone: 0808 800 4040 from Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.

Please let us know how you are getting on,

Best wishes

Jane

Hi Lizzy

My wife had peritoneal cancer as a primary which is pretty different from what this sounds like.

From what you are saying it sounds as if the suspicion is metastatic or secondary cancer there's relevant information here:

www.beatingbowelcancer.org/peritoneal-metastases

it is more difficult to deal with here for a number of reasons - firstly the peritoneum is a membrane that seperates your body organs from the rest of you and lubricates their movement. Part of this - the omentum can be removed surgically but there are limits to what can be removed safely.

My experience with oncologists is that they tend not to volunteer  a prognosis for a number of reasons. firstly there is a lot of variation in the statistics and two seemingly identical patients may turn out to have very different experiences. Secondly and importantly its not something you can untell someone and not everybody wants to know their prognosis.

If it's something you both definitely want to know and you're sure of that my advice is to look your specialist in the eye and ask them very directly what the prognosis is.

But still bear in mind that it will still be just a rough guide based on a wide variety of people whose cancers may be more or less agressive, and whose personal fitness and response to treatment will also vary widely.

I suspect that his secondary is very different to my wife's primary peritoneal as hers was not a single lump but an overall thickening throughout the region so I won't speculate based on that.

Good luck with the treatment I hope he responds well