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My pathology report said "no lymph nodes involved". The complication is that my renal artery was nicked during the surgery. It took a week to bleed out enough to make me dizzy and 10 units of blood to recover the lost volume. The nick was "embolized" by the interventional radiology team. The large volume of blood in my peritoneal cavity took months to drain and an abscess formed between my stomach and liver. It was staph, but not MRSA in the abscess. Likely infected during placement of drains. I later developed MRSA pneumonia. It required 5 weeks of IV infusions of vancomycin (1 gram every 12 hours) and cephalosporin (IV push every 8 hours). My wife managed the IV bag swaps and IV push at home. The infection was finally declared clear in late November. Because of the infections, I was not a candidate for post-op chemo to ensure anything "missed" was mopped up. The medical oncologist stated that efficacy of using chemo beyond the 12 week point after surgery is not supported and will not be pursued. Frankly, I'm happy to have dodged the chemo poisoning regimen.

Ampullary cancer is less the 0.5% of pancreatic type cancers. Pancreatic cancer is termed "peri-Ampullary". The number of studied cases is small, yet the survival statistics aren't very encouraging.

Thank you for your research and links.

Myrddin, didn't you have an ampullary adenocarcinoma, which is a cancer of the ampulla of Vater? If so, the studies I've been looking at officially classify that as “periampullary cancer.”

The main article I used (“Molecular pathways in periampullary cancer: An overview” ($27.95)) included ampullary cancer:

Periampullary adenocarcinoma (PAC) arises in the area surrounding Ampulla of Vater.It accounts for approximately 0.5–2% of all gastrointestinal malignancies and 20% of all tumors of the extrahepatic biliary tree [[1], [2], [3]](It includes tumors of heterogenous origin which are anatomically closely related and have a similar clinical presentation, itis anatomically categorized into tumors originating in the head of the pancreas (60%), the ampulla of Vater (20%), distal common bile duct (10%), and the duodenum (10%) [4].Ampullary carcinoma is the second most common type of periampullary malignancy and represent approximately 10% of cancers resected via Whipple's procedure (pancreaticoduodenectomy) [5,6]. The incidence of PAC is higher in men (0.7 in 100,000) as compared to women (0.4 in 100,000) and is mostly seen in older patients with the tumors rarely occurring before the age of 50 years

From a snip of a recent International Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Association HPB Journal article, “Long-term survival after minimally invasive resection versus open pancreaticoduodenectomy for periampullary cancers: a systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression:”

Definitions
Periampullary cancers were defined as cancers arising within 2 cm of the major papilla in the duodenum, encompassing four different types of cancers: (i) ampullary (ampulla of Vater); (ii) biliary (intrapancreatic distal bile duct); (iii) pancreatic (head–uncinate process) and (iv) duodenal (mainly from the second portion).17,18

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1365182X20311825

If you had ampullary cancer (cancer of the ampulla of Vater), my research holds for you.