Roland didn’t say which surgery he was having (colon or liver or both), nor is it clear for which surgery your mother’s doctor said no, so we need more info to fully compare.

Your mother’s doctor, oncologist or surgeon should be able to inform you. It’s possible that you need to be persistent getting their answer. You can ask your GP to make a call and do the asking for you, as sometimes doctors respond faster to their colleagues.

• Surgery on the liver when a person has secondary liver cancer with primary colon cancer doesn’t cure the colon cancer. The primary will re-invade the liver and the problem will continue (read colon cancer metastasized to liver)
• Surgery on the liver during palliative care will only be done if it can improve the patient’s quality of life.

Father didn’t have liver surgery for many reasons:

• his overall health was poor due to having the cancer
• he was 75
• the primary cancer was unknown, so without any general chemotherapy to attack "all kind of cancers", his primary would always re-invade his liver
• and part of his liver looked like a raisin bread (see picture at father’s tumors in the liver) in stead of having 1 clear little tumor.

Jim’s son, our most active metastatic liver cancer survivor didn’t get surgery either so far for the following reason:

• We have decided not to operate on the bowel tumor for the moment as he needs to gain more strength and put on more weight. The surgeons agreed with this as they said the bowel cancer is not now a problem.
• We want him to get stronger so he can have the operation and hopefully reverse the stoma.

If I didn’t answer your question Gwyn, please ask again.

Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer without getting well informed. Do ask and get a second opinion from other doctors from more specialized hospitals or doctors from your friends and family.