Cancer Update
I realized I never updated this stuff here so this is a deal I wrote up for my fantasy football league this morning. I didn’t even bother copy editing so it’s not my best. Apologies in advance.
In the spring I’d intermittently have trouble swallowing. I remember the first time was eating some Bojangle’s French fries. They were damned delicious. They also got stuck somewhere in my esophagus resulting in some weird hiccups and almost hurling. They eventually went down and I went about my business thinking it was just a random thing. Then it happened a couple of other times. Once I was eating eggs, another time it was a piece of salmon. Anyway .. it happened regularly enough I finally went to the doctor who referred me to a gastroenterologist who did an endoscopy (camera down the throat) June 6th and he found a tumor that “looked like it had been there a while.”
My wife and I met with an oncologist the next week who basically said “this isn’t the best kind of cancer to have but we won’t know until we do scans if it has spread outside the esophageal wall.” I’m an incredibly positive person especially when shit gets bad but the 48 hours after that appointment were pretty dark. I was pretty sure it had spread because I’d felt some weird pains in my back and lungs which are common places for esophageal cancer to spread. I made arrangements with a photographer friend of mine to shoot some videos for my wife and kids to watch in the coming years in case death was imminent. My mind was filled with images of my kids watching their Dad slowly die, my wife having to watch her husband slowly die and just the general toll that would take on them. I hate being a bother when healthy, I certainly didn’t want to be one on the way out the door. Thankfully scans were just a couple of days later and there was no spread.
The plan was rather cut and dried. Six weeks of chemotherapy along with 28 rounds of esophagus burning radiation followed by an 8–10 week break before an esophagectomy where they are to remove half of my esophagus. The treatment sucked but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I had a feeding tube which helped since radiation sunburns your esophagus while shrinking tumors so I only lost about five pounds before surgery. I continued exercising three or four days a week and kept working weekends at my freelance gigs.
Surgery was in early October and it was the worst part of the whole thing. Look up “Ivor Lewis Esophagectomy” if you want to be grossed out/amazed. Anyway .. I caught pneumonia in the hospital so I ended up being in the hospital for about a week. I got home, slowly started eating things like yogurt and oatmeal all while on a new feeding tube for 14 hours a day for about a month. It’s not all bad, I watched a TON of television and every Hornets game for the first month of the season. Eventually I progressed to eating normal food and now I can eat almost anything except salads and raw vegetables. I just have to be careful about it.
I’m back to normal. I feel 100%. I’m back to working full time, wrestling with my kids and most days forget I ever had cancer.
