another surgery?

[naz786]

Hello,
In July 2003 my mom had a recurrence of ovarian cancer after 6 years. You can imagine our surprise and sadness at the news. Since then, she had a debulking surgery followed by taxol/carboplatin, doxil, and thalomid. The tumor shrank but following an ill-advised chemo holiday it grew again. We had had so many opinions about what to do next, all from very renowned oncologists and surgeons. But we are still so confused.

In the initial surgery, the doctor did not take out all the mass because some was on the small intestine and deemed too risky to remove. Now a doctor at MAss General says he can remove it all without a colostomy (he says it never happened with this procedure in his 30 years). This sounds all well and good but my mom's first surgeon still claims that there's a lot you can't see in the CT scan and she would recommend chemo alone. My mom is also very wary of another extensive surgery since it took so long to recover from the last one. The chemo everybody recommends I think is topotecan and gemzar.

But we still do not know what to do about the surgery. It is an agonizing and obviously very time-sensitive decision so any advice/comments/personal experiences would be much welcome.