About Me

Hi - This is me BC - before cancer. I have even included a picture with my daughter. How do I begin this blog? First I would like like to tell you I am a member of a very exclusive club. The price of admission is pretty steep. For me it was about $200,000 in medical bills and a real chance of losing my life.

You can get in if you want. Some of my suggestions are to continue smoking, eat poorly, don't exercise, you know - stuff like that. Not to worry, you can do all the right things and still become a member. Just ignore getting routine check-ups and ignore the warning signs of cancer. That may be the ticket.

I would not want to scare you off with my stories of the side effects. Besides they are different for everybody. Some have very little side effects. If you are like me though, the side effects may be severe. Who knows you may be able to see the light of death like I did.

Lot of hurdles - huh? If you are lucky enough to pass all the hurdles like I did you can join me in a support group. I will even save a seat for you.

In the Beginning

It all started for me last November, 2006. Here I am going to the gym three days a week. A typical workout for me was bench pressing 270 pounds, leg pressing 540 pounds, 100 to 300 situps, and jogging two miles, on my lunch break. I thought I was bullet proof. Sometime around mid November I started getting tired after about ten minutes on the treadmill. I thought was this a middle age thing. I thought man, I need to train harder. Well, the harder I trained the worse it got.

One Tuesday afternoon I left the gym and headed to the local urgent care center. The doctor there diagnosed me with bronchitis. Cool enough, some antibiotics and I'm good as new. Two days later no progress, so I went to the emergency room at the local hospital. The doctor diagnosed me with bronchitis and a touch of asthma. Funny though I overheard two repiratory techs saying they did not see the asthma.

After being told several times by my regular doctor he was to busy to see me, I finally got an appointment. They did some blood work and found out I was anemic. Imagine that. Things started moving quickly after that.

The first week in December I had a colonscopy. My wife and I was led into a room and that's when my life changed forever. The doctor looked at me and told me I had cancer. I looked over at my wife and she was sobbing. All of a sudden emotionally, I started falling into a black hole of despair. In a second, I was slapped in the face with my mortality. Why couldn't I have gotten old, become demented, and drift off into the sunset never knowing what happened, not to be though. Once I regained my composure, I decided to focus on the battle I was facing, trying not to jump to conclusions.

Surgery was scheduled for January 2, 2007. While my friends were partying into the wee hours of the evening, I was drinking some potion designed to get me ready for surgery, get my drift? Five inches of my colon was removed. The official diagnosis was Stage II colon cancer. T-3 which means the tumor has penetrated through the colon wall. N-0 means no nodes were infected. My surgeon thought he got it all. I had a serious decision to make, do I go through chemo or not?

Chemo - The Real Killer

Funny, I don't understand why they call it chemo-therapy. That is like the ultimate oxymoron. For the life of me I don't see anything therapeutic about taking cancer drugs.

Anyway, my next challenge was to find an Oncologist. Within thirty minutes of where I live there are five Oncologists. From the inquiries I made, they all had excellent reputations but I wanted the best of the best. Of all the people I talked to there was one that stood out above the rest. That was Dr. Maria Moore.

My first meeting with her was somewhat bitter sweet. I was hoping for a clear direction on a treatment path. After all these years of cancer research, there seems to be no clear data on Stage II patients. Some are cured with surgery alone and others are not. Even for the patients who go through chemo there is no way to determine if surgery alone was the cure. Dr. Moore never made any recommendation. The decision was left up to me, what a burden. I decided to go through chemo. It was more mental than anything else. If chemo increased my chance of survival by five percent, I was willing to take that chance. Besides I am in peak physical condition, this is going to be cake walk. My plans were to have chemo on Friday afternoon, deal with the side effects on the weekend and work a full schedule. Yeah, that's the plan.

My next step was to have a catheter inserted in my chest under the skin for the purpose of administering chemo drugs. Excuse me, what is this? It's an easy procedure, basically a surgeon slices your chest open, inserts a metal object about the size of a quarter and runs a tube into your superior vena cava vein that leads to your heart and then sews you back up. Piece of cake.

After that procedure I was ready for chemo. My regimen was called Folfox4 which is a combination of Oxaliplatin, Folinic Acid and Fluorouracil. It took me six months to learn how to pronounce these words. I 'm still working on spelling them.

Here I am in the infusion room with my Oncology nurse. Notice how she's smiling as she juices me up? Gotta love it! I always wondered why they had to wear those rubber gloves. Are cancer drugs so dangerous that gloves have to be worn? Here this stuff was being injected into my body. Notice how the tube runs into my chest. If it wasn't me I'd be grossed out.

Folfox4 is a regimen that was given to me once every two weeks. It consists of a Folinic Acid infusion and an Oxaliplatin push with a horse syringe. Then I would wear a pump for fourty-eight hours with 5F-U(Fluorouracil) pumping through my veins. The first day of my first treatment I had a side effect called peripheral neuropathy. How do I describe neuropathy? Well anytime I tried to drink something cold it was like someone inserted a live electrical wire in my mouth and I was being shocked. Even putting my hands in cold water felt like my hands were burning, definately not cool. Next I got the hiccups that lasted for fourteen hours. There was no remedy for neuropathy but for the hiccups my doc prescribed Thorazine, an anti psychotic drug. Basically, taking Thorazine, I would get home Friday afternoon, go to bed and get up Sunday afternoon. Rip Van Winkle had nothing on me.

My, My, My, once bitten twice shy. I grew to fear chemo especially Oxaliplatin.

I was determined to live a normal life while on chemo and not change any routine. I went to the gym and did one of my normal workouts curling dumbells. The next morning I woke with a start, as Santa would say, to find my left arm twice the size of my right arm. Hey, I'm the Hulk. I went to my Oncologist and after x-rays, it was determined I had a blood clot. Basically, by pumpng iron my chest muscles pressed against the catheter and shut off blood supply to my arm. All of a sudden removing that catheter became an urgent priority. My surgeon was located in another town. I drove to meet her and upon arrival she laid me down, gave me a local anesthetic and proceded to cut that thing out of my chest while we talked about college football.

It was decided that I needed a picc line instead of a catheter. A picc line is a tube inserted in a vein in my right arm, at my elbow, across my chest and stopping short of my heart. Everything's back on track at least for a while. They said I could resume normal activities. For me that meant exercising along with playing softball. A week later my right arm became infected. One look at my arm and my Oncologist decided the picc line needed to come out. My nurse pulled it out in a nano second. Funny thing, I felt no pain. Another educational moment. I learned your nerves are located in your skin not in your body, so no pain is felt beyond your skin.

I'm running out of options for receiving chemo. It was decided to insert another catheter on my right side. This time exercising was prohibited for anything above my waist. So here we go again, a surgeon cutting in my chest. At least I have the scars to prove it.

One thing I learned about chemo, the more severe your cancer, the more powerful your drugs. I remained on Folfox4 from February until the end of May. That's when the real fun began. I continued to work until May 11, then I had to go out on disability. The cumulative effects of chemo was taking its toll.

The first week in June I hit the wall, as a marathon runner would say. My intestines shut down and everything I ate came up. I was admitted to the hospital. There I stayed for a total of ten days. Imagine laying in a bed for ten days with at least six IV tubes. The surgeon thought it would be a good idea to give my intestines a rest. So they inserted an NG tube up my nose down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines. It was then and there I decided I would rather die than have that done again. The purpose of the NG tube was to pump out my guts so they could take a rest. Yuck! Also, they wanted to do x-rays of my intestinal tract to see if there was a blockage. I couldn't swallow so they poured barium phosphate down the tube into my stomach. If you want to lose weight just go through what I did. I lost twenty-two pounds in four days.

I need a break. How about a poem. Do you like poetry?

Time is the essence
Time is the season
Time ain't no reason
Got no time to slow

Time everlasting
Time to play besides
Time ain't on my side
Time I'll never know

Ok - Break time's over, decision time again. After a month's rest of being off chemo do I stop or continue on. Mentally I did not want to have the lingering thought of stopping something midway. The decision was made to change the regimen to Roswell-Parke. This consisted of chemo every week for six weeks, skip a week, and chemo another six weeks. Normally Roswell-Parke consists of four, six week cycles. I was being given credit for time served. So that was our plan.

I did not talk about fatigue. I think the word fatigue does not give your energy level proper credit. It is more like bone sucking exhaustion that does not replenish after a night's rest. Walking to the mailbox fifty feet away was the day's challenge. The endurance of years of jogging and muscle tonicity from lifting weights was gone.

One of my life long dreams was to own a Harley. During this time I was able to get my motorcycle license and one weekend my buddy and I rented motorcycles. That's me with the Ninja helmet on. We took an all day ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Since my cancer was Stage II, I compromised with my wife and agreed to rent a Harley rather than buy one. Besides every bike I looked at and wanted was around $30,000. I have a hard time justifying spending that much money for two wheels. Maybe one day.

From July until the end of my treatment, the second week in September, 2007, things were pretty routine and uneventful. I feel like I had the right dosage of chemo and the side effects were tolerable. It was just boring sitting at home. There were things I did but the energy level was not there. It was work on projects for a couple hours and rest for the remainder of the day.

My Oncogolist and I agreed my date to return back to work was to be October 1, 2007.

I'm not scared of dying

And I don't really care

If it's peace you find in dying

Well then, let the time be near

Now that I have returned from the field of combat I wonder what is there in my life to fear. What can I do now that would give me a "wow" factor? Is there anything to get excited about anymore?

I am beginning to realize the biggest challenge is mental. Funny though getting back into the real world I feel like people are reluctant to talk about my experience. They say things like, " I hope you don't mind me asking but." I really don't mind talking about it. I believe I have defeated cancer, at least for now. Sometimes I think that people don't like to talk about my cancer because it makes them of their own mortality.

Life can be like a bus ride, some people ride the bus until the end and some get off sooner and at different times. I believe the door was open and I was getting ready to step off but somehow I was pulled back in. That's OK, I have an eleven year old I want to see grow up.

I was really looking forward to my first day back at work. I worked all day Monday. Tuesday I did not get out of bed until noon. Obviously I was not ready for prime time. I was not able to work a full week until my fourth week back at work. The things I could do with ease became very difficult. After seven weeks back at work, I feel like my strength is coming back. I guess my body is refocusing getting off chemo and returning to normal, at least I hope. I have started going back to the gym on my lunch break but I can tell it's going to take a year or more before I get all my strength back. As I slowly work back into mainstream life, I seem to question how I have been living prior to getting cancer. Sometimes I feel like my thoughts create my own reality. If I can change my thoughts then I can change my life. If there is one thing I would like to change about me is to develop an attitude of thankfulness. I am so fortunate to be alive. I believe God has given me a second chance at live and I hope I don't screw it up.

I will continue to post in the future. I hope you will check back occasionally. Thanks

mcharping@mchsi.com