Ironclad Immune System

After going through that day of testing, Steve headed back to work which felt like a relief compared to the testing he had just gone through.  It wasn't physically hard but the emotional stress was starting to weigh us both down.  The next 24 hours were excruciatingly stressful.  If the cancer had spread to any other organs or his brain, we were looking at Melanoma stage IV.  Everything we had read on that only added to our heart ache.  While waiting for test results to come back, I was still being the squeaky wheel, trying to get him an appointment at the Huntsman Cancer Institute.  I knew that is where we needed to be, but getting in was proving to be a challenge.  I have a friend who has a 12 year old daughter with melanoma.  She was the one I called first when I read the pathology report and it said Melanoma.  She took my hand and guided me to the right doctors to call.  When I told her I was having a hard time getting an appointment she suggested I call a dermatologist and see if they would refer us.  Maybe they had a special number to call or a magic touch?  Once again, she directed me to where we needed to be.  Through other friends and connections, we were able to get him in the next day.  We already had an appointment for a follow up with the surgeon that day so we made the appointment just an hour before.  Luckily, they were in the same hospital, so it made it very convenient.   That morning, we were very anxious for the results of the scans we had done the day before.  We called our doctor that morning to see if they had been sent to her yet.  She hadn't seen them yet but said they would be watching for them and they would call us the minute she received them.  When we went in for the scan at the hospital, they had just recently switched over to a new system and no one seemed to know how to work anything.  I knew they probably had the results in but didn't know how to post them so the doctors could have access to them.  I called into the hospital and I was right.  They did have the results but didn't know how to post them.  They said they could fax them to our doctor if I could give them our doctors fax number.  I had a phone number but not a fax for our doctor but I had my fax number.  That is what I gave her.  She faxed our results to our office and we got them before anyone else.  Steve and I raced down to the office and read the last page of the reports where is says conclusion.  Both scans said "There is normal activity in all regions."  I Cant even begin to express the feelings of relief we felt with this new news.  We now felt like we were given a chance to fight this cancer.  If it ended up in other organs, it sounded to us like a death sentence.  Now we had hope!  We headed off to see the dermatologist and surgeon.  I was driving so Steve could read a little closer what the reports had to say.  I knew the dermatologist had squeezed us in to his schedule so I didn't want to be late.  I wasn't thinking and I made a wrong turn. I ended up way past the hospital where we needed to be.  I was racing down the street trying to get back on the right path when I was caught speeding.  Yep, I got a ticket!  I was so relieved with the news that my husband might live through this that I didn't even care.  It's funny how your perspective changes when something like this effects your life.  We made it to our appointment no problem.  The cop was really fast to give me my ticket and send us on our way.  The dermatologist was the first doctor, up to this point, who sat down with us and talk to us about our new diagnosis.  He did and exam on Steve to try and find a primary source of the melanoma but couldn't find it.  He told us what to expect next and explained more about this awful cancer.  Even though it isn't a good diagnosis, we felt somewhat better having someone walking us through it now.  He said he would call down to the Huntsman Cancer Institute himself and talk to the melanoma doctor personally.  WOW!  now we're talking.  This is when we got somewhere.  They said they would call us that day and get an appointment. They did!  We got in to the Huntsman Center the very next day.  What a blessing!
Walking into the Huntsman Cancer Center is a surreal experience, hard to explain.  It is beautiful, big, and very scary but comforting all at once.  They had fit us in at the end of the day so most everyone was gone for the day.  We first met with the surgical intern who got his history and did a full body exam to try again to find a primary source of the melanoma.  Still no luck.  Next we were introduced to Dr. Andtbacka a melanoma surgeon.  He also came in and did a head to toe check to find a primary source.  Let's just say, they are very thorough!   Still no luck.  He told us that they see about 800 melanoma patients a year and about 10 of those are ones like Steve with no primary location found.  To me that sounded bad like if we didn't find where the melanoma was coming from it would keep spreading.  According to the doctor, he said statistically speaking, the melanoma patients that have no known origin do better.  The reason he said was that he probably did have an primary location, but his body recognized it as bad and fought it and destroyed the primary location.  That makes sense seeing that Steve has an amazingly strong immune system.  The other theory they had was that about 20 plus years ago, Steve had a spot removed from his back.  It was suspicious at the time so they removed it but never heard anything else about it.  That was so long ago, it was forgotten.  The doctor thinks that maybe that spot was melanoma but was never properly diagnosed.  If they removed the mole but didn't get deep enough the melanoma cells would have been left behind.  If that is the case, it's been 20 plus years that his body has been fighting this and been successful.  Both scenarios mean his body is super strong with an ironclad immune system and will be a benefit to him in this future fight.  The next step will be another surgery called a complete axillary lymph node dissection.  This is where they will go back in under his right arm and take out all the lymph nodes in that area.  They will send that to pathology and see what they find.  After that, they will have more information to determine the next course of treatment. For now we wait.  So much has happened in the last week that we are okay to take a break for a couple weeks and get things in order at home and work.  This time we will have time to prepare a little for what is to come.        

Rocked Our World!

Our journey started about 3 weeks ago.  Steve had noticed a lump under his right arm and it had been there for quite awhile.  At first we thought it may have been just a swollen lymph node.  Steve had been feeling kind of run down and tired for awhile so our thoughts were that it was his body just trying to fight something off.  When I needed to go to the doctor to get an antibiotic for a sinus infection I was fighting,  we decided to have the doctor check out the lump in his armpit.  The doctor felt it and seemed a bit concerned and told us that it was big enough that whatever it was it needed to come out.  We kind of got nervous at that time.  Steve decided he wanted a second opinion.   He called up another friend that was a doctor and had him take a look that same night.  This doctor seemed to think that it was only a cyst and that we had no need to worry.  He did say it was to big and needed to come out.  At this point we knew that we needed to find a surgeon and just go get it removed.  The following week Steve met with the surgeon and he told us that it wasn't a cyst, it was in fact a lymph node.  He also told us not to worry that only about 4% of all the lymph nodes they remove are cancerous.  That gave us a 96% chance that we would have this surgery and about a 2 week healing period then we would be back to our normal, crazy out of control, busy life as we knew it. Not the case.  Steve went in for surgery the very next morning and the doctor removed not one but 2 lymph nodes.  The big one we could feel was 5 cm.  That was bigger than the doctor thought.  The other one was 2 cm.  Off to pathology they went.  They told us it would take about a week before we would get any results back from pathology.  The next day is when we got our world rocked.  At lunch our family doctor called us on the phone to tell us that the preliminary pathology report was in and that is was positive for cancer.  She said she would leave the report at the front desk if we wanted to come get it and read it for our selves.  Our wost fears were now staring us right in the face.  Cancer!!!  That is what other people get, not Steve.  He is one healthy guy.  Never missed a day of work in the last 15 years.  Maybe even longer but that is how long we have been married and how long we have had our own business.  He is just "freakishly healthy" and one of my sister once said.  Now what??? Our doctor told us that we needed to go down to Salt Lake City to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and get started down there as soon as possible.  When we first were considering that it may be cancer we thought it might be lymphoma.  That sounded really scary but we have a friend who just got done with his Chemo and is doing really well.  Also the success with treating lymphoma was really high. We thought if he's got cancer at least it's a "good one" to get.   But who wants cancer? Then we looked a little closer at the pathology report and it said Metastatic malignant melanoma!  What the HECK!  We looked all over his body and couldn't find a single spot that looked unusual to us.  I'm not trained to find cancerous moles but I thought I might be able to see something suspicious.  A flood of many different emotions came over us.  We were scared, mad, sad, frustrated, and unsure of what lie ahead for us.  Steve went back to work and pretended nothing was wrong and I went to my sister that lives close by and had a good cry for just a few minutes then it was time to get busy figuring out what to do next.  I called down to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and talked to a guy there.  I told him I needed an apt. for my husband who was just diagnosed with cancer.  He asked what kind of cancer he had?  He asked me to fax the pathology report down to them and he would have the melanoma doctors look at it then he would call me back. Well, he didn't.  He had no idea he would be dealing with.  He did say that the doctors would want him to have a full body PET scan and a Brain MRI.   Than gave me something to do in the mean time.  I called our doctor and asked her to send over an order for the scans they told me that we would need to the hospital marked urgent! I'm not the most patient person when I'm on a mission.  I wanted to have the scans done and I wanted to be effective with our time.  They only do the scans once a week  and they only had one opening left for the next Monday.  Come Hell or high water that appointment was going to be ours.  We got both scans done on the same day.  Talk about an emotional day.  I think it was here at the Huntsman extension up here in Logan that the reality set in for both of us of what we were about to face.  Steve was given a choice of Banana or berry flavored barium to drink for his PET scan.  We ask the guy which one was better?  He told us that they weren't bad and both were fine.  So Steve picked banana.  Both sounded awful to me.  I went out to wait in the waiting room.  There I was surrounded with different cancer patients waiting to receive their treatments. They were talking to one another about how they were feeling and what was going on with them.  Now it was real!  My stomach felt like I was going to throw up!  I had to get out of there.  It was still to new for me and my emotions and feelings were still to raw.  I got up and went into the education room where I sat alone and talked on the phone with one of my sisters.  Steve text-ed me while I was waiting for him.  He had just drank the banana barium.  He had to wait 45 minutes for it to travel through his body before they could start the scan.  He said "the guy lied, said it wasn't bad" .