One year ago today, at the time that I write this post, they were just finishing up my 7 hr cancer resection surgery (for those who don’t know I was diagnosed with a rare deadly cancer the day before Thanksgiving 2009
called, Desmoplastic Small Cell Round Tumor Sarcoma — I received a total of 9 cycles of the hardest core chemo you can get and the surgery). They successfully removed my tumor (with clean margins), my right kidney, and reconstructed (with gortex) a 3 inch section of my inferior vena cava (large water-hose vein that feeds from the lower extremities). Once they finished my surgery I was taken to ICU for the following 2 days, and then moved to my all familiar cancer ward room to recover a few more days before being released to go home. Praise The LORD!!! I just had my 3rd (post-surgery/chemo) CT-scan last week, and I continue to be cancer-free; and just today I had another follow up Echo-Cardio-Gram, and my heart is functioning at peak 100% performance (one of the chemo drugs did some damage to my heart). So I am completely healthy and cancer free, from a cancer that only has a 15% survival rate (of course we don’t serve a God of the statistics!). I just wanted to acknowledge this great day in our lives, and, again, thank all of you who supported us and prayed us through that HELL! God is good, all the time . . . and all the time God is good! Here is one of the verses the Lord gave me the day I found out I had a mass, and with this I close:
When he heard this, Jesus said, βThis sickness will not end in death. No, it is for Godβs glory so that Godβs Son may be glorified through it.β ~John 11:4
PRAISE THE LORD!!! Below are three pictures of me (the 1st is a picture of me on my first day of chemo [early Dec. 2009] in the hospital [little did I know the hell that awaited], the 2nd is immediately following the surgery [May 6th 2010], I haven’t even come to yet; and the 3rd is me in ICU [May 7th 2010], the first thing I requested was my Bible π ):
Bobby what your symptoms leading up to the discovery of the cancer and how was it diagnosed.
Craig,
June 2009 I woke up with really bad gas (I thought), and couldn’t go back to sleep for a couple hrs. The next morning I woke up and still had a little pain in my rt abdomen; I thought I must’ve had a pulled muscle or something. I went for about two more months, and the pain got a little worse, and started to radiate down my “upper leg” a little; I thought I had a hernia. I finally went to a general doc in August, and he said I had a hernia (he only did a physical check); he said I could try and live with it for a couple of years, I thought I would try. Then about two months later I decided I didn’t want to live with it, and found a hernia specialist. We went and saw him, he didn’t feel a hernia with a physical check; so he ordered a CT scan. A week later I went in and had the CT scan, except when I was there the CT techs whole demeanor changed after they had a moment to examine my images. They immediately did an emergency Ultrasound testicular on me, they said they couldn’t tell me anything; that I had to call me doctor. So my stomach dropped and head spun, they did the Ultrasound on me (I thought I had testicular cancer). I left there in a panic, I called my doc, they told me they found an “abnormality,” and I had to wait a week before I finally went in; we had convinced ourselves it wasn’t anything, so I went in to the docs by myself. When I got there, he told me they found a mass the size of a softball by my rt kidney; he said it could be benign, but he thought it looked cancerous. So a week later they did a CT guided needle bioposy, and then it took another 2 weeks; they brought me in, and believed that it was lymphoma, the doc said out of the cancers that was a good one to have, but he said they still weren’t conclusive on what kind of lymphoma. So we waited another week, received a call, from the nurse, and she said it wasn’t lymphoma, but sarcoma; they wanted me to come into the office the next day (the day before Thanksgiving). We went in, and the doctor (this is still the hernia specialist) told us that it was “desmoplastic small cell round tumor sarcoma” (very rare maybe representing .01% of cancer diagnoses a year, and there is no specific treatment — they call it a “surgical cancer” — they ended up borrowing a protocol from the ewings sarcoma for mine [but that didn’t happen until we got hooked up with my oncologists, the sarcoma specialists at OHSU]). We spent Thanksgiving with my in-laws. Then we had an appointment with a team of awesome doctors, at one of a few sarcoma treatment centers in the USA (by “chance” we lived 15 minutes from it at OHSU in Oregon). They came up with a treatment plan, had a dual-port inserted to my rt upper chest, and that 1st picture of me in my red pajamas is me a couple days after that beginning my 1st cycle of chemo (my chemos were in-patient, one cycle was a continuous cycle for 2 days, and then my other kind of cycle was 5 days in patient, we tried that cycle out-patient, but that didn’t work so well . . . I always ended up in the hospital after that needing blood transfusions and even morphine pump for body sores mouth sores etc).
Anyway, there’s pretty much how it all unfolded. It was really scary, to say the least; yet the Lord was ever present through the whole thing, and still is π !
Congratulations. That is something to celebrate indeed!
Hi Pat,
Thank you, amen, I’m glad to be here π . . . praise Him! Thanks brother.