Hi Caffers..... just wanted to welcome you to the forum and thank you for telling us such an inspirational story.  You have been through such a lot and survived and that is just the sort of great news I love to hear - and many others here do too I would guess.

Happy New Year to you and your family Martin xxxxxxxxxx

Hi Martin,

Great to hear that someone has beaten this, however hard the journey has been.

I guess it's the luck of the draw and being diagnosed at an early stage will always swing the odds in your favour. I was pretty much asymptomatic apart from increasingly frequent acid reflux, no Barrett's as a pre-cursor or anything like that. My GP thought I probably had a peptic ulcer, so Oesophageal cancer wasn't mentioned until I was hit with the news that I was in Stage 4 and the damned thing had grown outwards and was wrapped around my aorta making it inoperable with chemo for palliative treatment the only option.. 

On the plus side, because it had grown outwards, I've not had any problems swallowing and managed to avoid a stent, peg feeding etc. I responded well to chemo and I'm still here against all the odds. I'm now officially a statistical outlier, for someone with a Stage 4 diagnosis, which is a pretty good place to be. 

Thanks for sharing your story, it's always good to hear about positive outcomes on here :-)

Cheers
Dave