Rob Ford will soon know if he will get cancer surgery
Councillor Rob Ford (open Rob Ford's policard) has undergone the tests. Now he is waiting for doctors to tell him if punishing chemotherapy and radiation shrank a cancerous tumour enough that they can perform potentially life-saving surgery.
“I’ll just wait for that call,” the former mayor said late Friday afternoon outside his city hall office after undergoing a CT scan and a later MRI.
Technicians performed the test, said Ford, 45, adding he had not seen or heard from any of his four doctors.
“I tried to read the faces of the guys doing the scans but they’re pretty good, they had poker faces,” he said with a chuckle.
“It’s an antsy feeling, you’re anxious,” waiting for some news, said the married father of two young children, adding the surgical team had given him no idea how long after the scans he would learn his fate.
The MRI had been scheduled for April 30, with surgery possibly a week later. But Ford said that, when he showed up for the CT scan, technicians told him he could undergo both tests Friday.
Ford was diagnosed last September with a rare and aggressive cancer. He has said the abdominal tumour needed to shrink to about three centimetres before surgeons could safely operate.
Earlier Friday, while visiting the city elections office to sign campaign finance filings, Ford said doctors should know the size of the tumour from the CT scan.
“It kind of threw me for a curve this morning because I had everything planned out,” Ford told reporters.
“In one sense I’m sort of relieved that we’re getting the MRI done so I know the results. I just want to know when the operation’s going to be. I don’t think they’re going to wait until May 7.”
Asked if there is a chance his doctors will tell him he cannot have the tumour-removal surgery, Ford paused and said: “Yeah, that’s a chance. I really don’t want to hear that news because if I can’t have the surgery it just means they can’t do anything more for me, so we’ll find out this afternoon what it’s gonna be. It’s out of my hands.”
Ford’s father, Doug Ford Sr., died from colon cancer in 2006.
Asked how he feels, Ford, who has regained hair and appears healthier, said: “I’m feeling good, just keep working every day and stay positive. That’s all you can do.”
But the waiting period has been tough on his family, said the married father of two young children.
“It’s the unknown that’s really tough for us, we don’t know what’s going on, but it’s in the good Lord’s hands now, so we’ll see what happens.”
The five-year survival rate for pleomorphic liposarcoma is 56 per cent, according to the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative based in Ossining, N.Y. The rate drops to 39 per cent at the 10-year mark.
Last fall, Dr. Walter Longo, chief of gastrointestinal surgery at Yale University, told the Star of someone in Ford’s position: “If they can get all the disease out surgically ... he’ll have about a 50/50 chance of beating it.”
With files from Lauren Pelley
