chapter 2

 

This is when the waiting began.  I have never been a very patient person to begin with, so my ability to wait was truly tested over the next few months. 

We now had to wait to hear where else my dad had cancer in his body, can you imagine that.  This is my dad, it can’t be possible.  He is immortal, cancer can’t touch him.. Things will be fine, I kept telling myself. 

We all arrived at the hospital the next day to await results. Sitting in the front lobby with my whole family was agony.  Everyone trying to be positive.. The waiting continued, until we seen ‘him’.  ‘He’ came to us to tell us he had seen the results of dad’s scans and everything was clear, and It was a very operable tumor in the brain.  What a relief, I could have swore someone just lifted weights off of me.  All the bad things I had thought were finally being put to rest, dad was going to be fine.  He would have surgery to take the tumor from the brain, get some treatment and we could all go back to life as normal.  That’s how it should have been. 

Dad was left to rest, and this was a mistake.  We all went about our day, why sit there, we knew he would be fine.  Little did we know that after we left, ‘she’ would come into his room while he had a visitor (not a family member I might add) and tell him he had lung cancer.  ‘HE’ had been wrong, looked at someone else’s scans possibly? Didn’t know how to read a scan properly? Possibly. 

What ever the excuse, we had been lifted and then dropped.  That was my peach, and my pit of the day.  To be told he would be fine (the peach), only to then be told he had lung cancer (the pit).. How could 2 doctors who apparently read the same charts, and seen the same scans tell us 2 totally different things within a matter of just a few hours. 

The results of the testing showed us that dad in fact had lung cancer which had spread through his blood to the brain. 

How did we not know? How did HE not know? How can this be? And most importantly can he be cured?

Just a few of the many questions I now had stiring in my mind.   Dad spent a few days in the hospital after these results came out, and for those few days dad would only refer to what he had as “C”.  Even in the notes he made when different doctors came in to talk to him, he would just write a simple C on the paper.  Then on the last day in the hospital when I went to see him he said it, “cancer” I am sure that was the first time I had heard my dad refer to what he had as cancer and not “C”.  He was facing this disease, I wasn’t. 

 And so the research began. I had been confused listening to these doctors talk about the cancer, and the tumor so I decided I needed to inform myself and that’s just what I did.   My goal in life became to find out everything I could about what he had.  Mike didn’t like that I spent so much time on the internet, didn’t agree with all the reading, and notes I was making.  I think he was the only one who really understood, as I did that we were facing a losing battle and I’m sure he was just trying to protect me.  I googled lung cancer that night for the first time, and was overwhelmed with what I found.  There are 2 different types of lung cancer I learned.. Small Cell, and non small cell.. Let’s just say small cell is the bad one, the one that only 6% of people who are diagnosed with are still alive 5 years after diagnosis.

Dad would be sent to London where a biopsy was done.  They stuck a needle into his lung to take a sample of the tumor so they could determine what type he had.  Needless to say we again had to wait for results.
I will never forget the feelings I had waiting to hear what type of lung cancer he had.. And I will never forget the day they came.  I was at Andy’s house, for what, I can’t remember but I know I was there when I got a message saying to stay put, everyone was on their way over and Dad had received his results and was coming to tell us.  What came next was my worst nightmare.  He told me he had small cell lung cancer.  It was at that point that I secretly started giving up.  I would tell no one of this, except pillow talk with Mike.  Dad was so excited and even cracked a beer, he had the guys from the shop there, as well as the family.  What the ‘f’ were we celebrating exactly? Apparently dad was told that this is a fast spreading cancer but it responds well to treatments.  I felt like I was missing something? And just really wanted to scream at them all.  To see my dad so happy, and positive over this reassured me, why should I be so worried if he wasn’t?

  It would be a few weeks before he could be seen by an oncologist in London at the cancer clinic.  These few weeks we were expected to go on with life as normal.. What? Are you kidding me, normal?? My whole life has just been turned around in the matter of days and now I watch my dad get up and go to work each day, and talk to his customers about the tumor he has growing in his brain like it’s nothing.  I felt like I was in a twilight zone, I wanted everyone’s life to just stop so they could all feel what I was feeling.  I needed to be informed, I don’t know why.  I became consumed with his disease and it overtook me.  I was constantly researching so I could be prepared when we met the oncologist

The day we went to London, I had my notebook in hand with all the information I had found on each type of lung cancer.  I don’t know what I planned to do with it, would I challenge the doctors? I didn’t really know, but as we waited to meet the first doctor I did feel prepared.  There would primarily be 2 oncologists we would deal with in London.  The first one we met was Dr.Yaremko, and I will never forget sitting in that office waiting on him.  When he came in, he asked dad to explain to him what has happened over the past few weeks.  We started the tape recorder we brought to record all the info we were about to receive, and so dad started.  “Well it was June 15, and Jess & Mike came into the shop to have lunch with me, and as soon as Jess started talking to me…” his voice trailed off.. We all looked over to see dad’s chin quivering and he was starting to choke up.  This would be one of the few times I would see my dad break down over what he was dealing with.  I took over and explained what exactly had happened on that day as my dad seemed to struggle to tell the story of how we discovered him that morning in june at the shop. How I thought he was having a stroke, which turned out to be a brain tumor, and so on.  Dr. Yaremko gave us great hope about the type of cancer, the results he had seen from the tests performed, and proceeded to tell us about the form of treatment they would be using.  It would be a combination, radiation and Chemotherapy treatment. At this point, I opened my notebook and looked onto a page where I had simply wrote – cisplatin & etoposide chemo treatments – widely used by most oncologists –survival rate less than using etoposide & carboplatin.

Tests have shown that treatment with estoposide & carboplatin showed a significant survival advantage over those receiving cisplatin & etoposide. This is information I receieved directly from the National Cancer Institute. 

At that very moment I heard him say he would be using Cisplatin & etoposide.  My heart sank, I guess I was really hoping I would hear him say the other 2 forms.  Since I had read in one medical journal that the other 2 gave a higher survival rate I had convinced myself that was the better option. 
I do remember questioning Dr. Yaremko on this issue, but I can’t remember exactly what his reasoning was, but he basically said he will be using what he suggests.  So I let it go.

The next issue to arise was that of staging.  We wanted to know what stage dad was at, and again I had been reading of the specific forms of staging lung cancer.  It is not really as simple as Stages 1-4, in Small Cell Lung Cancer there is a two tiered staging system.  Limited stage is where the cancer is still confined to the chest area, and Extensive Stage where the cancer has spread to other parts. 

Since I had been doing nothing but reading about this I already knew what we were going to be told that day, It was true, dad had Extensive Stage Small Cell Lung cancer, which basically translated into Stage 4.  I knew this was bad, my dad I don’t think so much.  He still managed to come out of that day with the most positive attitude.  This is a man who had just learned the fate of his life, and he basically told the doctors to bring it.  He was prepared to fight this.  It was this attitude of his that put faith back into me.