If at first you don't succeed...

Amusing anecdote -
My daughter, Coren, asked my wife the other day who was in charge of our family?
Erin said “God is in charge of our family. But He asks Mommy and Daddy to help Him be in charge. And when Daddy isn‘t around, Mommy is in charge and when Mommy isn‘t around, Daddy is in charge. But God is in charge of all of us.”
Coren thought this over and replied “Hmmm, Sometimes I think Daddy thinks he’s God.”
I can't argue with that.  It's true.
　

If at first you don’t succeed…
Wow. A lot has happened since my last post. And I can’t wait to tell you all about it. But first let me tell you what happened when I met with my Oncologist, Dr. Kominsky. A whole lotta nothing. Well, that’s not true, but it sure felt like it. Since numerous tumors were found in my PET scan, my first order of business with Dr. Kominsky was to get a biopsy. That sounds logical enough. I had a tumor under my left collar bone, a couple behind my heart and kidney, and another one in my lower gut. The tumor located under my left collar bone was determined to be the easiest to reach for a surgeon performing a biopsy. So Dr. Kominsky scheduled an appointment at the local hospital for me to have a needle biopsy. The procedure was pretty simple. I went to the hospital, checked in, dressed in the hospital garb, got wheeled into a laboratory office, received an injection of happy juice, felt a couple of pin pricks near my collar bone, and then got dressed and went home to await the results. Simple enough.

Now even before I had this biopsy, Dr. Kominsky was mentioning the possibility of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Because of the way the tumors were spread throughout my body and not confined to any specific internal organ, it appeared that they exhibited the patterns most associated with Lymphoma. A simple blood test was administered and immediately ruled out Non-Hodgkin’s which meant that if I did have Lymphoma, it would be the more treatable form of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.  That's good news.

Well after several days, I heard from Dr. Kominsky and was told that the result of my biopsy was inconclusive or non-diagnostic. It appears the pathologists did not get a good enough sample to determine much of anything. So a second needle biopsy was scheduled, this time with bigger needles. Once again I went to the hospital, got checked in, dressed up in the hospital garb, got wheeled into the same laboratory office, received some more happy juice, felt a couple of bigger pin pricks, and was wheeled back to my hospital room. Now unlike the first time, I wasn’t able to get dressed and go home right away because I had to have a bone marrow biopsy, as well. The doctors came in to my hospital room, had me flip over onto my stomach, and then used some sort of medieval boring tool to screw a hole into my hip and excavate marrow from my bone. Not pleasant. Not pleasant at all. But luckily I still had some residual happy juice in my system so I bared it with relative ease. Once they were finished and I had rested the required time, I got dressed, limped out of the hospital, and went home to wait again. Well, thankfully the bone marrow biopsy came back benign, but wouldn’t you know it - the results from the needle biopsy came back non-diagnostic. Again. Shoot! I guess they were still unable to determine anything from the needle biopsy sample size.

Dr. Kominsky was done fooling around now. He wanted a bigger, substantial sample that would prove once and for all that I have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It was decided that a large wedge-shaped section of the affected lymph node would be removed. As I met with the surgeon performing this operation, he told me the reasoning behind acquiring a larger biopsy sample. He said that with a needle biopsy a pathologist doesn’t always get a full assessment of the infected area. He likened it to a slice of pizza. If a person were to blindly grab with their fingers at a piece of pizza, they would likely get some cheese, tomato sauce, and crust. But chances are they would not grab all of the toppings of the pizza so they would not be able to determine what kind of pizza it was. So because he was going to go in and take out a slice of my lymph node, the pathologist would be able to see a whole slice with the cheese, the tomato sauce, the crust; but also the pepperoni and the olives and mushrooms and cancer. Hmmmm, yum. Cancer pizza. I asked a question that seemed logical at the time, “If it is better to get a slice of pizza, why not get the whole pizza? After all, I know a lot of people that get half pepperoni, half cheese on their pizza. What if I have a half benign, half malignant pizza?” Well, I was told that the complete removal of this particular lymph node would be tricky because it lies on top of some pretty major blood pathways. The surgeon did not feel comfortable slicing underneath the lymph node and risk possibly slicing up some things that are not meant to be sliced up. I appreciated his reluctance to needlessly slice me up and accepted that a slice was better than nothing.

I went to the surgeon’s office and got knocked out completely this time with some extremely powerful happy juice. An hour and a half later I woke up in a haze suffering from a severe sore throat - the tubes that were inserted into my throat to administer the anesthesia left me raw for a few days. I was asking for water for my throat when I saw Erin by my side talking to the surgeon. I heard a few words, not many, but what I did hear included “went well”, “good sample”, and “he did great”. That’s right! Did you hear that? I did great. I am able to lay motionless on a table for an hour and a half with the best of them.

Feeling confident that I will have answers from my latest biopsy, I looked forward to hearing from Dr. Kominsky. Unfortunately, when I heard from him I was greeted with more uncertain and vague results. The sample slice of the tumor was tested and deemed benign, but still looked highly unusual. It was sent to the NIH, National Institute of Health, for further review and hopefully, more clarity. Well, after three biopsies and three inconclusive results, Dr. Kominsky was a at a loss and decided it would be best if I stopped messing around and saw the big guns of medicine. He referred me to the Mayo Clinic and asked that I see an Oncologist and Neurologist to discuss my illness. I was scheduling the trip to Arizona and getting everything set up when we heard back from the NIH. They said that the sample they received was highly suspicious and they strongly suspected Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but they wanted another lymph node, a whole one this time, to dissect and examine. Because my trip to the Mayo Clinic was just a couple of weeks away, Dr. Kominsky suggested I see the doctors in Arizona first and if they still didn’t have answers when I returned, then we would go ahead and remove another tumor. As it turns out, I didn’t have to wait to come back before having another tumor removed. I ended up leaving a piece of myself in Arizona. A Cancerous piece. But that will all be told in my next post, when I share the details of my trip to the wonderful land of Arizona and it’s fine medical facility.

We are almost caught up to the present and you have almost been told about my past year which means we can stop toiling over the past and start focusing on the days ahead. I’m looking forward to that.