What I Said Then:

3 days after first receiving the news (so Thursday the 16th) we met with a surgeon to talk about getting a piece of lymph node tissue for a biopsy. It was also our 3 year wedding anniversary, not how we had originally planned to celebrate, but hey, at least we got to spend the day together!

It was at this appointment that we actually got to see the results of the CT Scan that I had 2 days earlier. The doctor walked us through what we were seeing and showed us the tumor that is in my chest. On the computer she was able to show us  hundreds of 2 dimensional images that were almost like layers and slices of my body that we could quickly scroll through. She showed us multiple angles of the right side of my chest and showed us the mass, indicating “You see this here? Yeah, there shouldn’t be anything there.”

The tumor itself is about 6 cm tall and 2 cm wide (about the size of an egg) and was the reason that I was coughing for so long. I would go take a big breath in and my lungs (and to a certain extent my trachea) would expand outward into the tumor. My body would react by thinking there was some kind irritant in the lungs and I would cough to try and get rid of it (but to no avail!). I also now understood why, when my symptoms were at their worst, that my cough was most acute when  I would lay down at night: because I have this egg falling back onto my lungs.

As I mentioned the other day, my symptoms, including the cough, have all but disappeared. But when I’m thinking about it like I am now, I start to feel that little tickle again.

The doctor explained that we were there because they needed to get a piece of diseased tissue in order to biopsy it and get a definitive answer on what we were dealing with. She said that it was something that they could do as an in-office visit using what amounts to a large needle to get a tissue sample “But, the neck is a busy place,” she said. And she would feel better doing this in an environment where there were more resources available should anything unexpected happen. Plus this way they could get the whole lymph node to ensure that there was enough for a usable sample. Translation: “this is a really simple and minor procedure, but we want to do it in the operating room just to be safe.” Great! Safety first!

Since it was now “surgery” (Pfft!) we spent about 20 minutes going over paperwork, what you can and can’t eat or drink beforehand, wash yourself with this, etc, etc. I put the word surgery in quotes because in my mind this was all really just a technicality and that in reality we were looking a quick in and out. I was pretty much thinking of this as “Drive-Thru” surgery (and even then I am still using the term “surgery” loosely).

Monday the 20th was to be the big day! But we had to get through an agonizingly long weekend, as we still hadn’t really told anybody and were started to feel a bit isolated.

When I say that we hadn’t told anybody, I mean we hadn’t told anybody. It had been almost a full week and we hadn’t told my parents or the rest of our family. My parents had left for a two-week vacation in their motor home (or RV, if you will) only a few days before my initial doctor’s appointment. For better or worse, I refused to call and deliver this news to them over the phone when they were 1200 miles away. It was a heavily debated point our house, but ultimately I decided it was my decision and would stick with my initial instincts and not ruin their vacation. We would wait the two weeks for them to get back so we could tell them in person.

It was for the sake of my whole family then that we didn’t tell my sister Tanya right away either. She was scheduled to go out and join my parents for a spell during their vacation, so we couldn’t just load her up with this bomb and send her out to spend a weekend with them. Instead we drove the “happy wagon” (as we would lovingly come to call the car when we were on our way deliver the news to people) out to my sister’s house on Sunday night when she returned home and told her the news. At some point I may see if I can convince her to write a post about what it was like to get punched in the face with news of the cancer bomb.

The next morning we checked in for the procedure (note: I’m still not calling it surgery here). There was a little more paperwork, some “change into this,” and a few lines of questioning from 2 nurses, an anesthesiologist, a surgeon, and a nurse anesthetist. Before I knew it, I looked like this, and things were suddenly getting much more serious than I had initially prepared myself for:

That is probably going be a tough image for my family to see. And I’ll admit that at this point I was rapidly getting way over my head and was starting to question my choice of not having told my parents yet. If you look closely,  I think you can even seen the doubt creeping onto my face in this picture. Or maybe that’s just my crustache.

In my mind, I was still okay though as far as my decision to not tell them goes, especially since I wasn’t going under a general anesthetic (for some reason I’d decided that if I was “going under” then I would have called, as if THAT would have meant it was actually surgery). Instead I was just going to be lightly sedated while they performed the procedure under a local anesthetic.

About an hour and a half after we had arrived at the hospital, the nurse anesthetist came to get me for the big moment. As we walked he asked me what I did for a living and as it turned out he and his family are season subscribers to a local theater where I have worked regularly and that he and his family had seen me in shows there. A few quick turns later and I was suddenly in the Operating Room. And it looked just it does on TV. Holy shit. Was this really happening?

I was really only allowed to be scared for a few minutes as I was quickly relaxed by the sedation medication that went in through my IV after I had laid myself down on the table. They numbed the area around my neck and while I don’t remember too many specifics do I remember that the nurses and the doctor were talking about pretty mundane things, and the doctor told me that’s how I could know that things were going well. The nurses occasionally asked me a few questions to ensure that I was still doing well and I was. I was awake throughout, but certainly drugged and a little sleepy. I was relaxed, and in a good place as my mind wandered freely.

Just as I had expected, the procedure was short. It couldn’t have been more than about 10 minutes,  and before I knew it I was asked to slowly sit up and move into the wheel chair so that they could take me to the recovery area. I wasn’t there for more than a minute before Christine joined me. She was happy to see me and was happy to see that I was already doing very well.

I was given some food and some juice since I hadn’t eaten all day, and as Christine and I chatted I noticed that her eyes kept wandering down to my neck before snapping back up to meet my eyes. “Oh, right!” I thought. “I should see if I can even tell what they did.” I asked if there was a mirror and Christine pulled out her iPhone and snapped a picture  which she reluctantly showed to me.

“I am going to be in … so … much … trouble!”

That was all I could say. It was the first and only thought that popped into my head. My parents were going to kill me. How was I going to be able to explain this. I mean, I looked like I had just had surgery!

“How long was I in there for?” I confusedly asked Christine.

“About 45 minutes.”

Shit.

On top of the 2 inch incision on my neck I had now pretty much “gone under.” Even according to my own previous definitions I’d officially had surgery.

A week later, when we were finally able to sit down with my parents and tell them what was going on, my neck looked much better. But I still think that this was one of the pieces that of the story that made everything that much harder to bear. After all, it’s visual evidence and a reminder that this whole thing is real.

After the surgery, and although I was now filled with a little more doubt, I stood by my decision not to call and tell my parents yet. As hard as it was going to be on all of us and as much as they may not understand right away, I was doing it for them, and I was doing it because I still thought it was the right thing to do. They were 1200 miles away, there was nothing they could have done either from there, or if they had been here for that matter. I know how much they look forward to their vacation and if I would called to tell them over the phone they would have driven straight through for 2 days to come home just to see me. By waiting until they were home they would get to see me and touch me and just be there with whole family when I delivered to them the hardest news that I can ever imagine a kid having to deliver to their parents. For better or worse, I was determined wait and load up into the “happy wagon” when they got home.

Besides, I’d still have plenty of cancer left by the time they got home!

It’s now been almost two weeks since the surgery and everything looks much better than it does in the picture taken minutes after I came out. In fact I’m pretty stoked about what a bad-ass scar this is going leave!

You should see the other guy!

At least I hope it makes a good scar since I don’t really have any. Though the surgeon (cause you know, it was surgery after all) did a great job, and with the liquid stitches they use these days, it may not leave much of a scar at all. And if that’s the case, then I declare that having cancer sucks!

What I Say Now:

Updated 1 year later – October 1, 2011

Well, if nothing else, I did get a pretty good scar from the surgery.

Here is what it looks like today:

I can’t get over how much bigger I look in this “now” photo. I will talk about it later posts, but I was severely underweight at the time of my diagnosis. I normally walk around in the 150’s but at the time those pictures were taken I was weighing in 130’s (I’m 5′ 11″). Today I’m on my way back down to a normal weight and in the mid 160’s after topping out in the solid 170’s.

In the post I talked about our surgery consultation (which happened on our anniversary) I mentioned that we were shown the CT Scan. YOU can see the ACTUAL IMAGES (!) we saw up on the left side of the title banner at the top of the blog, the “Then” picture. She showed them to us, but I’ll admit that I didn’t really understand what she meant by “there shouldn’t be anything there” until I would see the later images from during and post chemo treatments. “Oh, so there REALLY shouldn’t be anything there,” I remember saying once we finally had something to compare it to.

My surgery was on a Monday morning, and that night my sister, Tanya, came over. We had only JUST told her what was going on a day or two before, so it was all happening really fast for her (hell, for us too). We had dinner and since I was on pain pills, and feeling like a rock star, we went out and got Blizzard’s from Dairy Queen. Because of the pain pills I don’t remember much else about that night, but I most certainly remember the Dairy Queen. Mostly because a few hours later I would learn the hard way that I have what is known as in “intolerance” to vicodin. In short, I spent the night throwing-up every 30-60 minutes. Lovely.

I was still nauseas, and exhausted from lack of sleep, when we woke up the next morning for our first appointment with my oncologist. I have this distinct memory of my head hanging into the toilet and hearing Christine on the phone with the oncology front desk to see about rescheduling. They didn’t have anything available for another week if we rescheduled, so I rallied and we went in. We were only T-Plus 8 days from my initial visit to the doctor, but we had lived a lifetime of worry and anxiety during that first week, so it felt like an eternity, and there was no way I was going to wait another week.

Really though, there weren’t too many answers she could give us once we were there, since it would still be several days before the results from biopsy were back. As such she was reluctant to give anything other than generalizations. In fact, it was at this first appointment with her that planted the seed that it might not be “non-Hodgkin’s.” She wasn’t convinced, and felt there was a good chance of the biopsy coming back and showing Hodgkin’s. As it turns out, she was right.

After a few days there wasn’t any more “pain” from the surgery. But it was sore for a little over a week if I remember correctly, and I was probably a week-and-half to two weeks before I would no longer think about it. All in all the surgery wasn’t so bad, and as far as procedures go, I would have worse. The upcoming Chest Port installation was probably worse.