[gus_massa]

IANAMD.

Internet is full of crackpot sites with allcaps white text over a black background, and also slick university pages that overhype experimental treatment. Approach both with caution. In spite they may be wrong, sometimes they have some hints of interesting questions to make to your medical doctor.

I recommend to begin with Wikipedia, but I guess it's a rabbit hole you already entered. There are other good sites like Mayo Clinic, but they have more good generic info that a deep discussion about corner cases. The problem is that each cancer is very different, so each one is a corner case.

I think it's important to understand the different tradeoff. There are some horror stories about selling the family home to pay a procedure that extend the expected lifetime a few month. And there are also good case where after a surgery + rays + chemo there are 5 or 10 years without any problem, and then another surgery/treatment extend the life time even longer. It's important to understand the difference, so I think it's useful to read as much as possible to be able to talk with the medical doctors.

[helpseeker]

Thanks for your reply.

> I recommend to begin with Wikipedia, but I guess it's a rabbit hole you already entered.

Yes. And my wife falls into the category of 1-.1% of cases, where it's uncertain if it's a cyst, a HC or a HCa, if its malignant or not (+ fully functioning liver, and alcohol consumption of 1 glass of champagne every 5 years).

The standard liver cancer patient has a long history of alcoholism and well established liver-cirrhosis.

This results in fear of losing her within 12 months and dim hope of it all being "manageable" long enough for her to see her grandkids.

> * after a surgery + rays + chemo there are 5 or 10 years*

Apparently chemo works everywhere, but not in the liver.

> Internet is full of crackpots

I know, there's a lot of quackery. And understandably people will willingly choose the esoteric, if it gives them solace by thinking to be in control.

I'm not looking for quackery though. Rather like a single, or a group of Seheult MDs (https://twitter.com/MedCramVideos) just for liver-cancer and liver cysts.

Following the advice of people like a Seheult is not precisely "Following the Science" but rather "Following the frontrunners of science". But I think this is exactly what a lot of people with a rare disease a looking for.

[gus_massa]

It's strange that she doesn't have a biopsy of the first surgery. Do you think it has mutated?

The father of a friend died from liver cancer a few years ago. I think it was caused by an hepatitis instead of alcoholism. Anyway, he had some chemo delivered directly to the liver, but I'm not sure if that was a good/bad/stupid/fantastic/desperate idea.

Perhaps it can be useful to make a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_spe... . The normal NMR is useful to see the shape, but this version is somewhat similar to a chemical analysis of the tissue and in some cases it can distinguish cancer from other similar problems. As I said before IANAMD.