Am I doing as well as I did before cancer?

Yesterday, after Alan has completed his daily water exercises, he asked me if he was as mobile as he was before he was taken down by MM. Unfortunately, I had to tell him no, he was not. First of all, he's 12 years older. He's 66, not 54. That makes a difference. Second, he almost died three times. Third his body had been atrophied for several years from non-use. However, on the plus side, he is doing so much better than he has done in 12 years. It's amazing how much he has improved in the last year. One of the reasons for that is probably because we stopped him from taking interferon. We had noticed that after each treatment he was very weak and barely able to walk, so we stopped it. Cold turkey. We should have weaned him off it, I supposed, but we didn't. He lived through the non-weaning process and determined he was going to get to a place where he could walk to the mail box, walk around a ship while we cruised the Caribbean. He was going to be well enough to hold his grandchildren and play games with them. He is doing that and more. So, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and this is not the first tunnel through which we've passed in 12 years. It is the last of many. ttfn

Here we go!

The first doctor we visited was our family doctor who took one look at the bump on Alan's chest, which had grown since I first felt it three days before, and sent him to an oncologist. I don't recall his name, but he checked Alan out the same day, ordered an MRI, and when Alan went back, he said the bump was something called a plasmacytoma and it was nothing to worry about, but he was referring Alan to another oncologist, Dr. Robert Cody, and he would tell him (us) what the procedure was for removing the plasmacytoma. Well, what the first doctor didn't tell us was that Alan also had multiple myeloma (bone marrow cancer, often called blood cancer, but it is not blood cancer, but it is bone marrow cancer). The MRI showed that graphically, and the plasma thing was a result of the MM racing through Alan's body. The doctor warned him to not lift anything heavy, to not ride his tractor to mow the lawn, to basically try not to move very much because his bones were breaking and they were very weak and he could break more bones very easily. The plasmacytoma had broken his sternum. Doctor Cody referred Alan to the team of oncologists at the University of Arkansas where they do nothing but work on MM patients, testing new drugs, new methods, etc. Alan was assigned to a test group where he would have two autologous bone marrow transplants and months of chemo before and after the transplants. An autologous transplant is where the patient's own stem cells are used to in the transplant instead of getting cells from someone who is compatible. The stems are collected in a process call aphoresis. After being told by Dr. Cody that Alan had maybe one year to live if he did not get any treatment, and after several hours of prayer, Alan believed God wanted him to do what the doctors said to do and he was ready to do that. With treatment he might (MIGHT) have five years. So, we travelled out to Arkansas for Alan's first round of treatments to get him read for the bone marrow transplant #1. More to follow. ttfn

Getting started on the journey

I find it interesting that this idea came to me -- the idea of talking about our working through the various stages of this cancer -- the same evening that VP Candidate, Congresswoman, and Fox News Contributor Geraldine Ferarro was passing because of the same disease. She was diagnosed about the same time as Alan.

Alan and I met in 1959 and were married in 1966. Alan was diagnosed in 1999 with multiple myeloma (MM) and our lives were changed drastically. And I don't know how we could have gone through the near death experiences, the chemo, the follow-up, the never really feeling well, without the Lord Jesus Christ. He has been our strength, our peace, our mercy, our healer.

It has been a difficult time in our life. So many days have been spent in bed (Alan). So many days have been barely worth living through (Alan and Me). So many days where God has blessed with relatively good health and the ability to do things that we thought would be so simple at this time in our lives.

Alan was only 54 when he was diagnosed with MM, and the diagnosis was a fluke -- a merciful fluke. Alan had been having bad back pains and our doctor, as well as our heart specialist, said he had pleurisy. He was also having difficulty staying awake while he was driving the car.

One day I was rubbing my hand over his upper chest and I felt a bump -- a bump the size of a baseball -- sticking out of his chest. I told him he needed to get to the doctor right away. But since his mom was visiting, and he didn't want to interrupt her visit, he put it off the doctor's visit for a week.

I made him go to our doctor the day his mom left for her home in Pennsylvania. Our general practitioner took one look at him, sent him in for an MRI (immediately), which was read the same day, and he was referred to the best oncologist in Cincinnati (as far as we're concerned, and Cincinnati magazine agrees with us) who read his MRI, the PT scan of the lump and said Alan has multiple myeloma. Two days later we were traveling because of Dr. Cody's advice and recommendation, to Little Rock, AR to UAMS for one of their treatment trials (for MM).

When we first visited our Cincinnati oncologist (Dr. Robert Cody) we didn't go alone. We took a friend of ours who is a pharmacist with us. It was a great idea because he could ask questions about the disease and treatment that we wouldn't have thought to ask. Dr. Cody told us that Alan might have a year to live if we passed on any or minimal (comfort) treatment. If we went to Arkansas, he couldn't tell us how long Alan could be kept alive nor his quality of life, but the medical journals gave kudos to UAMS and their various treatments. They were actually looking at as long as five years life expectancy.

Alan has been alive now for almost 12 years!

I think I'll stop here and continue on another afternoon.

ttfn