It is as Christine stated.

I'm in that "terminal" group because I had have 5 distant outbreaks of tumors; 4 sets in my liver, and one lymph node midway between the bottom of the liver and the stomach. Last Monday, I got my final radiation treatment to that node.

But about that "terminal" bit; let's get real here for a moment. Every living thing is born with an inevitably terminal condition called "Life." No one has survived it yet. Every treatment we have available only extends the time we have to walk this planet, that we would otherwise not have without the treatment. That is no guarantee that we won't be in a fatal car crash when we leave the treatment facility.

So relax. Enjoy this moment, it is truly all we are assured of; don't waste it in worry about things we can't do anything about.

I went to the gym today, but I lost 8 lbs during the past three weeks due to nausea limiting my ability to ingest (and maintain) sufficient calories. That was all muscle, so after having to quit the stair-master at the 22 min mark (instead of my goal of 30 min), I called it a day and will go again Wednesday.

You may be interested to know that there is another method of radiation treatment; it is snaking a tube up through the femoral artery (enter at the groin) and into the liver. Once there, branch arteries to other organs are blocked off and the two lobes of the liver are filled with SIRIspheres, small plastic beads (1/3 the diameter of the human hair), each with a tiny hunk of Yttrium-90 (an active Beta-particle emitter) and left in place permanently.

I had that done last November, it successfully knocked down the two sets of tumors that were active in my liver (recurrences #3 and #4) at the time. We discovered the active lymph node when we discovered that the Xeloda was no longer effective and made the decision to go the SIRIspheres route, but we let it (the lymph node) ride until the SIRIspheres were in place and had some time to "cool down." (Yttrium-90 has a short half-life.)

Six weeks or so later, we attacked the node with the focused-beam radiation - which I had 8 weeks of when I was initially treated, back in late ;09 - and found that the node had grown from 0.2 cm to 4 cm in the interim.

My MO thinks that since that growth was the only change in that time (as opposed to more of them showing "hot,") there's a good chance that I could be free of new mets for as much as a year now (my longest period since the first recurrence has been the 90 day wait after the end of treatment PET.

So, yes, even though you've had your "lifetime" radiation allowance, you can easily have more.