cancer Archives - Enterlife

Thankful Praise – Jude’s Name

03/02/2013 By lmadmin 2 Comments

Sorry for the lack of bloggage. Life has been busy, so busy in fact, that I had outsource this blog post to my wonderfully, wonderful wife!

Jude’s Name

Our little guys name literally means “thankful praise”. His middle name ‘Matthias’ means “gift of God” (just like his big brother and sister).

Titus Theodore – “giant gift of God” | Lillian Keona – “beautiful gift of God”

Also like his big brother, Jude is an apostolic book in the New Testament. The key phrase of the book of Jude is “contend for the faith” or fight for the faith. Our reliance on God over the past 10 months has been paramount. Naming our bundle of joy Jude is our “shout out” to Faith. Not only have we had to trust God, but we have, once again, experienced His unfailing love and faithfulness. “Our God is able”. This phrase is only mentioned three times in the Bible. My favorite is found in Ephesians 3:20, “Our God is able to do exceedingly more than we can ever ask or imagine according to the power at work within us“. This phrase is also found in Jude 1:24, “To Him who is able to keep us from falling and present us before His glorious throne without fault and with great Joy“.

The Book of Jude is all about fighting for the Faith. This little book is filled with examples of God’s faithfulness and the importance of us trusting God and being faithful. Our little Jude will always be a reminder to us of God’s Faithfulness and His overwhelming presence in our lives. Even though it is extremely difficult at times, we must fight for the faith. We pray that Jude’s life brings glory and honor to God and points others to His faithful love.

A Series of 2’s

His birth day was yet another gift of God’s faithfulness and presence. We were beyond anxious as we anticipated Jude’s birth. I was convinced he would arrive early. However, he overshot his due date by 3 days. We almost induced 2 days after his due date but cancelled the night before. We decided to wait and trust. Everything worked out just about perfectly. He arrived just in time to give us precious private family time. Titus and Lily (with the help of our good friend Wendy) were able to come to the hospital shortly after they woke up Saturday morning and come in to meet Jude just a few short minutes after he was born. Titus was even able to cut his umbilical chord! We realized Jude’s birth date was significantly meaningful as it correlates with other significant dates throughout these past 10 months. We found out Luke needed chemotherapy on May 2, (Jude was conceived that weekend, before Luke started chemo). Luke’s RPLND surgery was on his birthday August 2, and just six months later Jude was born, February 2! Love it! God Provides!

“The Lord has done great things for us and we are filled with Joy!” Psalm 126:3

Jude’s One Month Old Today 3-2

Our precious gift is a month old today. We have so enjoyed this first month of getting to know our little guy and watching him grow and change. This month has been full of snuggles, kisses, and overflowing hearts. It has not been without stress and challenges as we adjust to our new family dynamic, and as we continue to restart life after cancer. Titus and Lily are amazing with Jude. They love him so much and their gratitude for his presence in our family constantly shows. “Thankful praise” perfectly describes our family’s heart!

“To the only God our Savior be all glory, honor, majesty, power and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forever more! Amen.” Jude 1:25

Oh hey, I’m cancer free!

08/29/2012 By lmadmin 8 Comments

We Kicked Cancer in the Face

Death to Cancer

After 9 weeks of chemotherapy and a 7 hour surgery with a week in the hospital, I’m officially cancer free! Eat that cancer! My pathology results came in, and they found no active cancer cells in the 40+ lymph nodes they removed. Chemotherapy successful nuked all traces of cancer in my body, and the surgery cleaned up house. All the enlarged lymph nodes contained scar tissue and other evidence that the teratoma cells were dead.

Four Weeks After Surgery

Tomorrow marks 4 weeks since my surgery. Things are SO MUCH better. I’m off my awful 20g-of-fat-per-day diet, and I can eat anything I want! I still spend a fair amount of the day in bed resting, which isn’t what I had originally anticipated. But I underestimated the effects of such an invasive surgery. I started heading back into the office this week, but so far have only managed an hour or two before I’m exhausted.

My stomach and incision are doing great. Though the better I feel, the more I use my abdominal muscles, which brings more pain and tenderness. Baby steps though, are better than no steps at all. I’ve got another 8 weeks till I’m back to 90%.

So What’s Next

If you remember, all of my cancer treatment has happened locally, except my surgery in Seattle. I’ve officially “transfered” back to local care for my follow-up and surveillance appointments. Right now I’m scheduled to go in every 3 months for the first year, then every 4 months for a year, then every 6 months after that. The chances of cancer returning are in the 2-3% range over the next 5 years. I like those numbers, and if my cancer does return, we’ll just have to kick it in the face again.

Now that we have the pathology results, we know the exact details of the cancer that was in my lymph nodes. Which means we’re able to dial in what my surveillance looks like, specifically no more CT scans! We’ll be primarily watching blood tumor markers.

P.S. GOD IS GOOD.

Surgery Tomorrow – Bowel Prep has Begun!

08/01/2012 By lmadmin 6 Comments

Overview of the next few days.

I won’t be tweeting from the operating room, sorry. But, I thought I’d share what the next few days are going to look like for us. I’m typing this on a train (but posting it from the hotel) that’s taking us to Seattle, beautiful foggy sunrise this morning. We’re decided on the train for several reasons. (1) We won’t need our car as we’re staying at the hospital’s hotel so we’ll save money on parking, (2) it’s awesome (3), it should be more comfortable on the way home even though it will take more time (I can go to the bathroom whenever I need to… lots of fluids!), (4) my dad came up with us for a few days, so he can jump on the train to head back easily, and (5) it’s awesome.

Bowel Prep.

Oh, and I’m getting some facial hair back!

If you watched the video I posted about the surgery, you saw them tossing my intestines around like a jump rope. Today is the day for making sure they are empty. The main reasons being: (1) as my body restarts from the anesthesia, my bowels will take a few days to start working. After several days of nothing “moving”, well, the body turns into a brick factory if you know what I’m saying. (2) if for some reasons they cut my intestines, the less that’s in there the better for minimizing the risk of infections. So, I can have breakfast today, but after 10am, it’s clear liquids only. At 2pm, I’ll drink a wonderful bottle of lemon flavored laxative. After that it’s just water until after surgery. It will likely be a few days until I get to eat any real food, while my bowels return from their slumber.

Surgery.

We check in to the hospital at 5:30am to begin preparing for my 7:20am surgery. Our Dr. said it should be at least a 6 hour surgery, with 2 hours in recovery. They’ll be removing around 50 lymph nodes from my left and right side near my spine in the retroperitoneal zone. After that I get moved into the ICU for at least 1 day, until finally making my way into a hospital room for another 5-6 days. We’ll be released from the hospital once I’ve made it to solid food, had a bowel movement, had all my tubes removed (like my catheter), and I’m able to move around a bit. The estimate around 7 days total, but my recovery might be slightly slower since my body is still recovering from chemotherapy… but I plan on being home to my children as fast as possible (without blowing out my staples).

I’ll try to keep updating things as they are happening, but I’m not sure what that will look like for me yet. I plan on resting and recovering.

Does that make sense? Any questions about my surgery?

They want my insides – Surgery in one week

07/26/2012 By lmadmin 13 Comments

What my CT scan showed

Many of you have been anxiously awaiting the results of the CT scan that I had this past Friday. Obviously by the time of this post, the results showed that my lymph nodes didn’t shrink enough to avoid surgery. My largest node pre-chemo was 2.5cm (not outrageously enlarged, anything above 1cm is on “the list”), and post-chemo it’s 2.1cm. The Dr’s suspected that this would be the case, as the most likely type of cancer that I have (teratoma) does respond to chemotherapy, but typically requires surgery to remove the dead leftovers. I know, that’s a little confusing.

Let’s allow a skunk be our metaphorical link to understanding. Suppose a skunk rudely traps himself underneath your house, and continuously blasts your dwelling with his nasty-cloud. After he refuses your lovely invitation to leave, you launch poison grenades at him for a week straight hoping it will kill him, leaving you a light snack. Well, the grenades work, but they only stop him from spraying your quaint residence. That’s awesome! But… he’s still in there, doing who knows what. He could actually be dead, and he’d either fade away into the dust of the earth, or begin to rot and fester. Or he may be slowly reloading, waiting for Thanksgiving dinner to bring out the big guns. Just to be on the safe side, you use your chainsaw to tear open your living room floor, and you get rid of that jerk.

We’re removing the jerk that is cancer. That’s the first analogy that came to mind, feel free to enjoy it.

That may sound like all bad news, but we didn’t find any new skunks… err, places where the cancer had spread. It was pretty unlikely that it would have spread during chemo, but I’ve been riding the “unlikely train” for a few years now with cancer. My lungs, spine, bones, and brain all look as wonderful as they ever have.

Why surgery is the next step

For complicated reasons, the lymph nodes behind my intestines are the first place where cancer spreads beyond the testicle. Once there, Mr. Cancer has a lot more options for places to go, as he can travel by land or by sea (body fluid or tissue). So to allow the him the opportunity to spread more is not good. The RPLND surgery has been apart of the testicular cancer cure process for a long time. It was on the table originally as an option during my first round of cancer. But at the stage I was at, surveillance was the better option.

After this surgery, I have a 3-5% chance of relapse during the first 3 years. After that the number drops quiet a bit, but I’ll still be having my blood tested and getting scans for the rest of my life.

What the surgery looks like

I’m scheduled to have the surgery in ONE WEEK. Our appointment today was quickly followed with several rush pre-surgery appointments, which made things really hard for the kiddos. We came back to our hotel and had lunch around 2:30pm, and miraculously we all took a much needed nap. We go back in tomorrow morning for the final pre-chemo appointments in Seattle.

It’s best to do the surgery right after my body has recovered from chemotherapy. They estimate that I’ll be in the hospital for at least 7 days, with the first in the ICU. I’ll be off of solid food for 3-4 days following the surgery, as my intestines will need time to unscramble themselves. The surgery is quiet intense, as there are a LOT of lymph nodes in the retroperitoneal zone. Plus, my swollen lymph nodes are on my right and left side, which is unusual as I only had cancer on my left side. I believe they’ll remove 50+ lymph nodes.

Below is a short (1-2 minute) video that overviews the surgery. It isn’t over-the-top-brutal, but you may not want to watching while eating breakfast… it will give you a much better understanding of the surgery than I can describe. The short explanation is: They make an incision from my ribs to my waist, and go skunk-hunting.

What’s next and how are we doing

So after recovering from surgery (2-4 weeks total), I’ll likely enter back into surveillance mode, with blood work and scans every 2 months for the first year with decreasing frequency each year after that. There’s a small small small chance that I’d need more chemotherapy (if they found active cancer cells in my lymph nodes, IE the skunk was fooling us all, and blasted us with skunk juice when we went to get him).

We are very much looking forward to being done with this. It’s been a long few months. We’re tired. We don’t like cancer. It causes to much anxiety, it’s ridiculously expensive, and it’s messing up our lives. That being said, we’ve been blessed by our supportive church, family, friends, and strangers. My wife is beyond a doubt my favorite person, seriously, she’s incredible. We’ve had great care the whole time, and are in the hands of the top Dr’s in the nation for this surgery. In rains on the just and the unjust, God is still God, God is still good, and cancer still sucks.

Speaking of tired, I’m going to bed without proof-reading this much, or confirming that it makes any sense. 😀

I’m done with Chemo, and I still have two lungs!

07/14/2012 By lmadmin 2 Comments

I’m Done With Chemo

Sorry for the delay in updating you on the ADVENTURES OF CANCER MAN! Last week we delayed my final chemotherapy treatment from Tuesday to Friday because there was some concern for my lungs being negatively effected by the chemo. My lung tests did show a decreased ability to absorb some important chemical element, called oxygen. Our baseline tests at the beginning of my chemo regimen showed a result of 135% of average. My test last week showed 106%. While I’m still demonstrating super-human breathing abilities, the decrease in numbers was enough of a concern to skip the final treatment (I actually skipped the final two “small” treatments, as my breathing was much worse two weeks ago).

My lungs are much better now. I’m beginning to feel normal again, especially as my fatigue begins to subside. I’m still easily exhausted, and have headaches here and there, but overall, I’m feeling pretty awesome. We even made a short trip to the river with one of our canoes, it was Lily’s first canoe trip!

Cancer Institute in Seattle

One week from today, I’ll be drinking my chemical smoothie preparing for the long awaited CT scan. Then the following week we head to Seattle, where unfortunately we’ll have to wait until Wednesday for the results of the scan. BUT, then we’ll know. I’m sure there are lots of possible scenarios, but in our mind its: (1) Surgery, (2) No Surgery. And honestly, I’m to the point now where I’d rather just have the surgery and be done with cancer.

With my initial round of cancer, we decided to just go with surveillence instead of chemo and surgery, as about 85-90% (or some other number I don’t remember) of people end of being cured with just the orchiectomy if caught early enough. In “the old days” they typically did both surgery and chemo just to make sure the cancer was dead dead dead. But for a large number of men, they just aren’t needed. I’m just “special” enough to be outside the normal window.

So, we’re thankful to have a team awaiting us in Seattle, as well as our Oncologist here in town.

Resuming Normal

It really does feel amazing to do normal things. Laying in bed for 9 weeks isn’t super awesome, so just being able to go outside and play with the family, drive my car, put furniture together, go to the pool, and get back to work has been great. My chemo brain is fading slowly, reading large chunks of text stills fatigues my mind and makes my eyeballs dizzy.

Hair

I’m adjusting nicely to having no hair, although a surprising number of people have asked us where Lily gets her curly hair from and responding with “the bald guy” is always fun. My eyebrows are at about 40%, but they are still fading. I had quite the layer of peach fuzz on my face in places where my beard didn’t grow before, so here’s hoping for a crazy mountain man beard when it comes back in. All my other hair is growing back in slowly, but most of it is super thing and falls out easily. (If that’s to much information… just be glad there aren’t any pictures!)