chemo Archives - Enterlife

One Week After Surgery

08/14/2012 By lmadmin 6 Comments

One Week Later… I’m Home!

Well, at the time of writing it’s been a little over a week, but I was released from the hospital 7 days after my 7 hour surgery. My Urological Surgeon took some pictures during the surgery at my request… but he hasn’t emailed them to me yet. I’ll post them when I get them.

The surgery went “textbook” (which means perfect in Dr. Speak). They did an incredible job closing up the incision, I’m very thankful we chose to go to Seattle. I never got a total lymph node count, but the estimate is that around 50 were removed, with the largest being 4cm+. The only issue I had was some tape blisters around the incision. I have about 7 that are nickel sized that are recovery nicely now, but they were quite gross at the hospital.

I got home 7 days after the surgery in Seattle, which was pretty quick considering my body is still angry about the chemotherapy. We rode the train home so I could lay down in a sleeper car, which was awesome. I don’t know if i could have sat up for 8 hours (or the 5 that driving would have taken).

The Worst Part of In the Hospital Recovery

My pain level after the surgery was intense, but overall it was manageable thanks to drugs. I had an epidural and a “magic button” to control the pain. What I couldn’t control however was the pain related to my NG tube. If you’ve ever had one you know how awful they are, I’m just thankful I was a sleep when they put it in. An NG tube goes through the nose, past the throat, and into the stomach to remove acid and bile while my intenstines slowly “woke up” from the trama of surgery and anesthesia. It doesn’t really sound that bad, but man alive did it make my throat sore. I wasn’t allowed to drink water or eat ice chips, so I was at the mercy of a small green sponge on the end of a stick to sooth my throat. They gave me some medicated throat spray, but it wasn’t able to even take the edge off of the pain. I had to be able to pass gas before they would remove the tube, and I was soooooo relieved when that time came (get it… muahahaha).

Having the tube removed wasn’t a fun process, but at least it was quick. It felt like someone was pulling something out of my stomach through my nose… oh wait, that’s exactly what they did. 😀 It took several days for the pain to go away when swallowing. What amplified the awfulness of the NG tube was that it aggravated my throat which made me hack and cough phlegm, which REALLY hurt my abdomen.

What the Rest of My Recovery Looks Like

I spend most of my day in bed, with increasing amounts of time sitting up. I’m able to shower, and take a short walk each day. Hopefully within 2 weeks I’ll be up and moving like normal, but I’ve got a 3 month limit on lifting anything over 10 pounds. I’m also currently on a 20g of fat PER DAY diet. I’d say it’s the worst part of my at-home recovery, except that my wife and mom have been working incredibly hard to make delicious food. But man, I just want to eat fried bacon wrapped cheese cubes. Mmmmmm. Soon enough though. I’m on such a restricted diet so that fat doesn’t leak into my abdominal cavity from the sites where the lymph nodes where removed. I’ve got about a week left on it.

I’ll post about the actual results of the surgery, my pathology of the lymph nodes, and what the rest of my cancer journey will look like soon.

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!)

Am I Cancer Free? – Day 1, Week 3, Cycle 3

07/02/2012 By lmadmin 8 Comments

What’s Been Happening

My appologies for no videos, I know you’ve been eagerly waiting for my bald-headed-humor to return, unfortunately you’ll have to read this update.

Friday, June 22nd was the last 8 hour day of chemo, from a long Monday through Friday week of chemo. I’m VERY glad to be done with that. I was supposed to have a short chemo appointment on Tuesday of this past week, but over the weekend I developed some chest tightness and a cough that might be related to one of the chemo drugs (bleomycin). We’re going to do some lung tests tomorrow (Tuesday), and so we pushed back my FINAL TREATMENT to Friday, July 6th. IF my lungs fail their test, then we’ll skip the final chemo appointment. A lot of people develop a reaction or complications to bleomycin towards the end of the treatment schedule. My chest feels dramatically better than it did over the weekend, but I still get short of breath a lightheaded VERY quickly.

They wanted to check my pulse and heart rate on Tuesday, so they briskly walked me around the Dr’s office a few times and my heart rate jumped up to 125. It’s a LOT of fun speed walking circles around the waiting room while everyone is staring at you in case you where wondering.

So Am I Cancer-Free?

I dunno. Since the first cycle, my bHCG tumor marker has been back in the male-human zone (which is 1-3, mine was 96 at the beginning). However, some type of Testicular Cancer respond to chemotherapy in different ways. I have a CT scan on July 20th, and following that, we’ll be in Seattle for a few days to meet with my “new team”. I’ll be in the hands of the Virginia Mason Testicular Cancer Program, which is where Dr. Craig Nichols is, who was Lance Armstrong’s Oncologist. I already signed up for the Tour de France, I just have to decide on a color for my full body spandex speed suit.

“My team” will be going over all my medical history with a fine tooth comb, not because my current Oncologist hasn’t been doing a good job, but he isn’t a TC specialist. They’ll be reviewing all my CT scans (I’ve had a billion of them at about $1k each) and recommending what the next step should be.

So Now We Wait.

Waiting on the lung test results, waiting for the CT scan, waiting for my appointment in Seattle, waiting on the next step. Fortunately, I’m starting to feel better. It’s supposed to be 1-3 months before I begin to return to “normal Luke”. I no longer feel nauseous, and I’ve been spending about half the day out of bed lately. But sweet Moses, I’ve had a crazy headache for the past few days, and I haven’t been sleeping very well. It has been incredible however, to be able to play with my kiddos, to do the dishes, to drive my car, ya know, normal stuff. And in the midst of waiting, I’m trying to remain in the present, tomorrow will get here eventually, but my wife and my kids are here today!

2 Days left (only 4 more treatments)! – Day 4, Week 1, Cycle 3

06/21/2012 By lmadmin Leave a Comment

Video-loggage:

2 Days left!

Today and tomorrow, and then I’m done with “the big ones”. This following week likely won’t be too enjoyable as I’m recoverying, but, the end is in sight, and that’s a gloriously glorious thing. I’m looking forward to small things:

Spending time with my kids without having to remind them to not jump on my or scream to loud… I want to embrace the crazy!
Helping out around the house more
Being able to start jogging again
Not spending all day sitting/lying down
Returning to work! (my brain has been driving me insane)
Using shampoo
The return of my beard
Deodorant working
Knowing when I want to eat
Being able to spend more than 5 minutes outside (I’m afraid my white reflector head is going to cause plane crashes)
And not peeing 25 times a day

That’s a short list.