Tag: update

Struggles and some good news

Now I’m trying to mend my ways
I had enough of pain and bad will
Good enough for you someday
Till then, it’s a losing battle…

It’s always been in my nature to be the beast
Blame the maker but stay with me

Josh Ritter, Losing Battles

Hello everyone! I am glad to be back and writing again. I am pacing myself very carefully considering my strict screen / reading time limitations. I’ve been very eager to write and update but haven’t been able to due to those restrictions / limitations (post surgery was limited to five minutes a day of any screen time).

The second time has been much more of a struggle. The hospital stay was filled with lots of intense situations. My surgery went fine but protocol requires one night in the ICU. While I was there, there was no ICU room available so the hospital converted the post-op room into an overflow ICU. I was stationed there for one night, checked in on at every hour to make sure I was stable. The things that I heard and were happening in that overflow ICU. It was brutal. I had a perimeter of curtain drew around me so I couldn’t see anything (and really didn’t want to) but I could hear everything. Lots of moaning and suffering. The hospital staff was doing their best but you knew there were stretched too thin and worn down. Nearly everyone I talked to was on a temporary “floating assignment” and away from where they normally work. I overhead talk of how many nurses were calling in sick because they themselves had tested positive for COVID. Still, the nurses were there, holding the line, doing their jobs. It felt like a military situation in someways. I thought a lot about institutions (like hospitals and healthcare) and mission (this was more than just a job to these men and women– there had to be some higher calling and strong purpose to what they do everyday for their job). Even though the results were not A+, these men and women were holding it together by their own sheer grit. Still, being in the hospital, espeically the overflow ICU felt like being in a bomb waiting to explode and I wanted to get out of there (I can still hear the sounds from that night). I wore my facemask nearly all the time. One time Paige found me with my facemask and eyemask on (I brought the eyemask so I could sleep, the lights stay on in the overflow ICU 24 hours) I must’ve looked like a cross between Darth Vader and Bane, trying to sleep. I was very nervous about contracting COVID the entire time. At one point Paige had to take my facemask away so I wouldn’t try to sleep with it on.

One of the good things was how well I was doing post surgery. As opposed to the first cranitomy (or cranny as my neurosurgeon starting referring to them), I remember it taking a while to get “with it” and feel lucid. This time I was lucid and with it from the moment of waking up (still in the operating room!). I remember looking at my hands and pumping each hand to make sure I had motion on each side of my body…I did! Paige got to come back and see me and she was blown away on how well I looked and well I was communicating. My neurosurgeon talked with me and I got to hear how well the surgery went.
You don’t know this, but there was a strong chance they would find cancer when they opened me up again. At our consult at Wake Forest, the surgeon there said they find it, “a lot”, if they find it, they remove it. The also were installing “chemo wafers” on my brain in case there was ever a reoccurance. These “chemo wafers” are supposed to be especially good at treating melanoma. So when they operated on me, there would be taking a sample of my brain tissue, freezing it for 20 minutes, and running a short-term pathology to see if it was malignant or not. Any other samples obtained would be send to long term pathology which takes two weeks but would determine if the sample was cancer tumor or not (this was how I was first diagnosed with metastatic melanoma). Well, when I came to the first question I had for my neurosurgeon was “What was the path?” Response: “Necrosis. Dead brain tissue. There’s another sample sent to long-term path.” I knew what that meant– I wouldn’t know long term path for a couple of weeks. But in the short term, they hadn’t found cancer, only dead brain tissue consistent with necrosis. This was very good news!

Continue reading “Struggles and some good news”

My Survivalship Story Revised- and an Update

An update about this week

[A lot has happened this month. My last post discussed the timing of my needed urgent surgery. I was told that because of insurance reasons I would not know until the day before the surgery but they would go ahead and schedule it. So the surgery was scheduled for Tuesday, December 29th. Because insurance offices were already closed for the holidays, we would not know officially until Monday December 28th if it would be approved (even though it’s an urgent surgery I supposed their protocols require attention since the surgery would be before the end-of-the year). Well, I got the call and the surgery is on for tomorrow. The next time you see a picture of me, my hair will be a lot shorter. Tomorrow at 9am I report to the hospital for another craniotomy to remove the dead brain tissue. It’s been a difficult month and the anticipation leading up to this surgery has been brutal. The drugs I’ve been on to keep my brain swelling in check have worked well for my brain but my body is ready to surrender to the needed recovery that will have to take place over this next week. There has been a lot of anxiety, shaking, crying, and insomnia. It’s been hard to bare that during Christmas. I’m looking forward to getting this done, getting back home and recovering and starting to feel like myself again.

Paige is going into full caretaker-mode and will be my visitor during my hospital stay. We still don’t know yet how that fully works and won’t until tomorrow. I have some family driving up to see me but with COVID protocols it’s all a mess so we all just have to wait and see. It’s a lot of impossible situations.

Thank you all for your support and prayers. If you’d like to do something for me or my family during my recovery, please wait until I get home from the hospital and I’ll get the word out about what can be done (meals, etc.).

I plan on blogging during my recovery. From what I understand, my limitations and restrictions will be the same as before. So we’ll just have to see.]

Some news about the direction of the blog

I haven’t posted in a while. It’s not because I haven’t been writing. It’s because since the seizure I’ve been thinking a great deal about what I want this blog to be and some goals that I have in mind.

After a lot of thought and discussion with Paige, the wisest one in the household, I’d like this blog to start featuring survivialship stories. I believe there is a critical need for positive survival stories for those facing cancer or those who have a loved one facing cancer. I sought those out when I underwent my treatment and I clung to those stories like rosary beads. Even with my limited reintroduction to the world, I’ve heard other success stories in my own community and want to share them. I don’t want to focus on figures that can take private jets to the most advanced medical centers in the world for the best treatment. Rather, I’d like to focus on people and families you and I would come across in our daily lives. And there are so many stories. Cancer is not going away. But we keep surviving and it’s import to keep reminding ourselves of that. Our stories not only contain the heavy pathos and revelations that only those who’ve stood next to death can feel. But these stories contain details– details that may help you, or someone in your family who may be affected by cancer. If there’s even a chance that it helps only one person then let’s keep sharing these stories.

While thinking about where to start it became starkly apparent that my story had many holes in it to fill in. If you’ve read my blog since I start writing it in May 2019 and you read my original ‘My Journey’ page, then you read my experiences right up to the point of my first PET scan. I did not even yet know where the cancer was in my body and what my treatment might be. In the last couple months I’ve been working to fill in the gaps of the story. To tell my survivorship story from going to work as usual on a Thursday morning, discovering a malignant brain tumor later that day, to finding my tests results in late August that my brain and body were clear of any detectable signs of cancer. So it the most natural place to start was my own story.
I know many of you read the original post. This one is much longer and contains a lot more detail– but I promise you, this will help you or someone you love that has to deal with cancer and that’s going to happen to you at some point in your life. I’m sorry, but that is a reality.

And to be clear, my struggles are not over. But like chapters in a book, the revised Stage 4 Cancer Survivalship Story page is the story of my cancer survivialship, not my struggles with immunotherapy-induced hepatitis or my ongoing struggles with necrosis. But at 26,000+ words I had to break somewhere. And, many struggles with cancer end up being with side-effects of the treatment itself, which I feel deserves its own attention due to the detailed nature of what goes on in our mysterious bodies after we receive these amazing but still yet still nebulous treatments. As an expert melanoma doctor at Duke Cancer Center once said, “Sometimes, I fee like we’re still in the dark ages with these treatments.”

So here is my story again. It’s Rebooted. There are more details. Some dates have been corrected. Some original memories righted. Memory is a funny thing. I wrote what I remembered but it’s only after talking to family and reflecting on it more that I could recall that what I wrote was not actually what happened sometimes. For instance, my family wasn’t there in the ICU to see me wake up post-surgery. That’s crazy. Family wouldn’t be allowed in until I was awake, conscious, and stable. My mother didn’t leave my side while I dreamed I was dying and had an out-of-body experience. She was sitting right next to me because no one else was with me at the time. So, this revising my own survivorship story let me reflect on those details, and piece together our insane calendar of events that was the summer of 2019.

I’m eager to start gather more survivorship stories. Unfortunately, I think I’ll have to wait until I can sit next to someone at a restaurant and talk about their experience with cancer intimately for multiple hours. COVID times are not the best of times for cancer close talk.

I still intend to publish posts about my spiritual ponderings. I’ve added some categories (as if that matters to readers) for book reviews, reflections, survivorship stories, and updates. I still have yet to decide what to do with the “updates” section. I’d like to keep everyone who wants to be up-to-date with my health but I don’t want to overwhelm anyone or have redundant posts. Please reply with a suggestions.