4/23/16
Cancer is a very humbling experience. There are many stages you go through - disbelief, anger and frustration, sorrow, dealing with it, fear, and forgetting it. I just spent a wonderful day being the person I know I was destined to be enjoying breakfast with my family, taking my 4 yr old to soccer, lunch with the grandparents, nap ride driving through this beautiful part of the country as spring comes into bloom, an ice cream treat at a local farm stand, then an afternoon playing in the sandbox or t-ball with my boys, capped by a healthy dinner. The boys were quick to bed. Almost makes you forget you have a life threatening illness that's working counterproductive to all the things you were destined to be.
As I progressed through the shock and acceptance of my cancer diagnosis I let my co-workers know. That includes my supplier Pratt & Whitney. One of the guys I work with on a weekly basis at P&W shared his cancer experience with me. Metastatic melanoma (skin cancer) that has spread to his liver and his lungs - he is stage 4. He was diagnosed in Jan 2015 just after I took over the project. While I was building our first LM/P&W schedule he had surgery to have the skin on his back removed. Just before a joint briefing we would give he found it had spread to his lungs and liver. He tried an immuntherapy which made him extremely sick and had to be discontinued. He was switched to a targeted therapy drug to keep him comfortable. As our project began test he learned the targeted therapy was slowing the spread but it is only effective for 11 months before he will have to try another drug. He will try another immuntherapy drug middle of this summer just as we get back into testing. There is no Stage 5, he will have to live with the cancer and find ways to live with it. After hearing his story I felt truly humbled. I'm still in testing for staging, but if I am stage 2 it has a 93% cure rate. Shoot I should be able to work, play, exercise, heck run the Boston marathon with this. What am I complaining about?
This week I had my EKG (heart test) and MRI. The EKG was to baseline my heart function and verify it is strong enough for chemo and the subsequent treatments. It also gives the doctors a heart baseline so they can see if any of the functions are degraded with the chemo. The images were really neat, like my sons ultrasounds you could see all 4 chambers along with the aorta and major valves. Everything looked ok. I thought it was funny the valves look like flaps of skin blowing in the breeze. Next I had the chest MRI. I got so many warnings about the MRI - how closed in you would feel and how loud the machine is. My surgeon even recommended I take Aventi (sp?) prior to easy the nerves. Honestly I found it very akin to a hearing test. For my procedure, I laid face down on what looked like a massage table with two openings for the breasts. I went into the machine feet first. Overall it took about 15 min with half being pictures and half being pictures with a contrast injected into my veins. When the machine was idle it would chirp like a bird to let the technician know it was ready on standby. When it was running it would make these loud beeps on one side or the other. The technician would talk to me to tell me when a series of tests would be running, and I held a bulb in one hand if I needed to alert the technician of any concerns. Totally like a hearing test. The only difference was the contrast made my tongue feel swollen and had a funny taste, but that was it.
One more test next week for staging (CT chest/abdomen/pelvis) and a second opinion on treatment options at Dana Farber. After that it gets real with starting chemo. Looked into using the cold cap to try and save my hair from falling out but it is not real effective against AC chemo. May just give myself a nice short haircut before the fun starts.
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