3 Years!!!

Tomorrow, September 16,2013 marks 3 years cancer free! So much has changed over these last 3 years, most of which I never would have imagined possible as I was laying in that hospital bed at the Mayo Clinic going through my 2nd bone marrow transplant in as many years. On January 28,2011 I wrote a very honest post about being scared. About how I feared death and feared the unknown that I was facing at the time. I wish I could say now that I no longer fear the unknown, but I can say that I embrace the unknown as it has only brought me positivity since that time. The doctors at one point gave me a 25-30% chance of living more than 5 years; which to be honest scared me and probably did more harm than good at the time. But as I look back on the past three years now, I am glad that they told me this because it has made me embrace each and every day for what it truly is, a gift. Life is too short to worry about what might happen, we m

Cancer Free!!!!

I feel horrible for not updating my blog for everyone especially after the news that I received last month. After 4 days of testing at the Mayo Clinic Dr. Reeder and his colleagues determined that I was 100% cancer free and being one year out from transplant this was a huge accomplishment. It meant that I could get off of the majority of the meds that I take and I could finally do some things that normal healthy people might take for granted. I have been cleared to travel outside of the US, I can help my dad work on renovating his house and I can eat raw fish again!!!
I have thanked many people in this blog but seemed to have over looked many others. I need to first and foremost thank the wonderful woman that is out there somewhere in the United States that gave me the gift of life again. I do not know you but I hope to one day meet you and thank you for saving my life! What you have done is such a selfless act and I can never, ever thank you enough for what you have done. Without your gift I would be dead and I love and commend you for that!!!
I also need to thank Dr. Liu and his staff especially his nurse Jerlyn, it's been four years and you have always made me feel comfortable and safe even during my most trying times. You are an excellent oncologist and friend, thank you! Dr. Reeder, you brought your knowledge and skills of years of cancer treatment and it is because of you and the othe doctors and Mayo that I am alive and doing so well. One day we will have to get together here in Hawaii so I can buy you some good sushi and some wine! There have been many, many other nurses and assistants that have helped me along the way but the best NP that I have met and feel honored to have met is Mary Peterson. You truly helped to inspire me to not give up when things got hard after this second transplant and honestly were such a help to both me and my mom. Your support made this recent ordeal so much easier, I hope to see you in a few weeks and be able to enjoy a dinner at Alessias and some wine and finally meet your husband. Thank you again for everything that you have ever done!
I am doing great now, work is getting busier and I am hoping to work my way up the ladder at MD and prove to them that now that I am healthy I can do the work to become a solid asset to the Company for many years to come... I also want to thank Dr. Lani Leary my phsychologist for helping me work through the tough transition that I went through after this past transplant. Our talks have really enlightened me and helped me to view life in a much more positive and precious way.

Update, Finally!!!

I apologize for not updating as often as I should. I am back to work full time so I am on a computer all day long at work and the last thing I want to do is go home and turn on my computer. But I want to keep everyone updated on my progress so I know I should be on here more often than I have.
Dr. Liu and Dr. Reeder have both said that I am doing great and I have had pretty much NO side-effects from the transplant! An excellent sign as I come up on my one year anniversary on September 16th. I cannot believe it has been a year already since I was given the gift of life by a complete stranger. I hope to be able to contact them once the year waiting period is up and with any luck they will agree to meet with me as I want to thank them personally for being my angel!!! They saved my life and I will be forever grateful to them....
I will be heading up to Arizona again on October 9th for 3 days of tests and scans and then a meeting with Dr. Reeder for my one year check up. I know that everything is going to go great and the test results are going to be excellent! And if I am lucky he will take me off the last of my daily meds so that I can finally enjoy some raw fish again, it was easy to skip when I was in Arizona but it is absolute torture to see poke at every bbq I go to and not be able to have any. I think I am going to go on a poke eating binge as soon as I am able to eat it again! Watch out Rutger Market cause I am coming to wipe out your inventory :)
I have attached a short clip of the video that Jim took during my transplant. It shows the actual donor cells traveling down the IV into my arm. Amazing how this tiny bag of cells rebuilt my entire system! *** Thank you Jim for taking this video as I was so medicated I don't really remember any of this day or the few that followed.

Great News!!!

Sorry about the lack of updating, I have busy with work and everything else now that I am back in Hawaii. So, I went to Arizona a couple of weeks ago and had my 6 month PET scan and meeting with Dr. Reeder. After an unnerving few minutes of small talk he finally broke the news and told me that the scan showed NO, ZERO, ZILCH signs of cancer!!! I beat this monster once again and for the final time! I am more than relieved to say the least, I feel as if the weight of the world has finally been lifted off of my shoulders. It is now time for me to focus on the future and move on with my life and be happy again. This transplant has been VERY hard on me both emotionally and physically and I still have a ways to go but after everything that I have gone through I know that I can make it through this final hurdle. I could not have done it without all of your support but more importantly I could not have done it without my mom. She has been there for me more than any of you out there reading this can even imagine. And I wish I could repay her for everything that she has done for me but all I can tell her is that I love her and would not be here today had it not been for her!!!

I have even more great news if you can believe it. I was recently nominated and then selected as a 2012 American Cancer Society Hero of Hope. My duties will include speaking at different engagements and telling my story and hopefully inspire others with cancer to speak out about their battles. I will travel to the outer islands for their Relay for Life events but also travel to Dallas, TX this Fall for the annual meeting and conference. It is going to be a lot of work but I am up for the challenge and look forward to spreading hope to others.

Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty I am free at last!

First and foremost I would like to thank everyone for their kind comments and emails regarding my last post! It really helped me to get some feelings off of my chest that I have been struggling with for a while. Secondly and just as important, I met with Dr. Reeder last Friday (2/4) and after some cajoling he agreed to release me to come home! With the news, I rushed home and booked my flight on Hawaiian Airlines before he could change his mind! So I will be heading home this Wednesday (2/9). I cannot wait to get back and see my family, friends and coworkers. It will be hard to leave my mom and Jim and the rest of my siblings here in AZ (Kevin, Bryn and Brooke) and their families but I will visit often and keep in touch like I always do.

Which leads me to another topic that I seemed to have failed to cover in this blog although it is something of great importance to me and that is the fantastic job my mom and Jim have done for me as my caregivers throughout this latest battle and all the previous ones. They have both put up with the stresses and worries of my sickness with such grace and dignity and never showed me their worries despite my knowing how worried they really were. It is very hard on cancer caregivers as the patients are always the ones that receive all of the attention when in fact they are going through just as much physical and mental stress as the patient and need the same amount of support to help them make it through. I just hope they know that all of their sacrifices have not gone unnoticed or unappreciated by me and I will be forever grateful to them! I love you both very much for everything that you have done and continue to do!I cannot list everyone that has helped me throughout this whole ordeal, but I cannot forget the support that I have gotten from my Dad and Nani Janet as well. While they may have not been up here to witness the Mayo side of treatments, they have both been there for me every step of the way back home at Straub. And have gone through the same stresses and worries as everyone else. I still cry when I think of the day that I was first diagnosed and Dr. Liu walked into the room and my dad broke down and asked why it couldn't have been him getting sick instead for me. I love you both as well and cannot wait to see you both in a few days!!

With this being said, I would like to also ask that whenever you talk to my mom or my dad or Jim or ANY of my other family members and ask them how I am doing, please also take the time to ask them how THEY are doing. Because we are all going through this together. Cancer doesn't just affect the patient it affects everyone in their lives!!!

*** If I did not mention you in this blog specifically please do not feel left out, I would end up with a novel if I had to list everyone that has been there for me throughout the last three years. Just know that you and your love and prayers are appreciated and do not go forgotten.

*** I'd also like to ask those of you who read this blog and pray for me to please say a prayer for a few of my friends that are also battling their own forms of cancer, Wyman Ly, Steve Hext and Rhone Rarick. We can all beat this thing if we stick together and fight like we never fought before, so hang in there guys and keep swinging!

Being Scared

I'm not quite sure why I am writing this blog entry tonight, possibly because it is 2:15 am and I have been trying unsuccessfully for the past few hours to sleep or maybe I just needed to get things off of my chest... Throughout this journey of fighting cancer I have remained upbeat and positive with everyone around me because in a way it made me feel better about things but also I think I just didn't want people to see how scared I truly am. I felt like I had to put up a front and brush things off as just being minor even though they were not and I was freaking out inside. Maybe it was an ancient survival instinct kicking in, blocking out the fear so that I could go on with things. Or maybe it's because it's not the macho thing to come out and admit that I am scared but there comes a time in your life when I think that everyone must admit it at some point. I'm sure that even a guy like Laird Hamilton who catches huge unthinkable waves for fun has been scared before in his life. I'm sure some of the top professional fighters have been scared at least once during a bout. There have to be Navy Seals out there that were scared when they were faced with live combat and all that training and bullets were suddenly real. Now whether they have admitted it, I don't know. But I think that it takes a real man to come out and admit they are scared. And I am scared...

For me the physical part of the cancer treatment has actually not been the hard part as most people would think. The mass amounts of low dose and high dose chemotherapy, the radiation to my chest area to the point that I have already met the max amount of radiation that a person should get, the two bone marrow transplants, those are all things that I am able to deal with. Sure it was hard and I felt horrible but I knew that after a few weeks the sickness would go away and I'd be feeling better again. Even the long lasting side effects like the neuropathy in my feet and left hand or the shoulder pain caused by the excessive radiation to the nerves in my brachial plexus, I can live with those. No, for me the hardest part has been the mental aspect of the entire fight. The not knowing what the next scan is going to show, will the cancer be gone, will it have spread, if the treatment doesn't work do I still have other options. It is these things that scare me and keep me up at night. And now following this last transplant there is a whole new demon to be afraid of GVHD. Will I develop chronic GVHD? How badly if I do develop it? Is it going to affect my lungs and kidneys or will it be more minor and just be an annoying skin rash? I know that I shouldn't worry about these things until they actually happen (hopefully they will not), but they always seem to creep into my mind on nights like tonight and keep me from getting the rest that I need.

Honestly, what scares me the most is the one thing that cancers patients tend to never want to talk about, the elephant in the room so to speak, and that is death. I still have so much to do and so many places to see and people to meet and I am scared that I will never get a chance to do them. But what scares me even more is the suffering that my family and friends are going to go through. They have already been through so much with me going through this battle and the last thing that I want to do is hurt them even more! And sure they will eventually be able to move on but I'm sure a piece of them will never be the same. And I know it is not my fault, it is the cancer that is to blame, but I can't help but feel guilty sometimes for the sorrow that they have already had to deal with and I don't want to put them through anymore. I have spent many nights crying myself to sleep thinking and worrying about this until I just can't worry anymore and I have no more tears to cry.

Dr. Reeder once told me before this 2nd transplant started that I had a choice, do the transplant and have a 25-30% chance of living more than three years or not do it and have a 5% chance of living more than three years. I took the obvious choice, you don't have to spend much time in Vegas to know that you should always play the game with the better odds. But I have been thinking about these numbers a lot recently and what they mean to me. Theoretically, I may not be around to see my 35 birthday, see my nieces and nephews play in their first games or even grow up for that matter. And that really pisses me off! Those percentages have now become my driving force to survive, I come from stubborn scotch blood and we don't give up a fight so easily so I am going to prove ALL of those doctors and their studies wrong! Who are they to tell me what I can and cannot do based on previous statistics, don't group me in with a bunch of other people because I am not like those people. I refuse to lose this battle! I may be scared as I go through it and my opponent may be bigger, stronger, and faster than I am but I have heart and determination and a will to live so that I do not hurt my friends and family. Tough times don't last, tough people do! So it is time for me to toughen up and keep on fighting. "Clear Eyes, Full Heart, CAN'T LOSE"!!!

New Years Update..

Happy 2011 everyone, I'm sorry that it has taken me so long to update my blog!!! A lot has taken place since my last post, and thankfully it's all been good! Right before Christmas I had my follow up bone marrow biopsy and PET/ CT scan. These tests are always very stressful for me and my loved ones as they determine if the treatments have been working and in the past they have not yielded great results. However, this time I received excellent news! The bone marrow biopsy showed no signs of cancer in my marrow and the PET/ CT scan showed that the latest transplant had worked and the donors cells were attacking the cancer at an astounding rate. Both of the masses have significantly decreased in size and the doctors feel that the new cells will continue to fight and soon the caner will be completely eradicated. It is still too early to be considered in remission, however I am on my way and keeping positive that I will be soon!

I was hoping that Dr. Reeder would release me to return to Hawaii at the end of this month, but he wants me to stay a little bit longer while he weans me off of the prednisone steroids that I have been on since the initial diagnosis of the slight graft v. host disease. He wants to make sure that once I am completely off of the prednisone the GVHD does not flare back up. I am now down to 5mg every other day and will completely stop the pills next Tuesday, after that I will meet with him for an assessment sometime during the first week of February. If everything looks good, I will hopefully be released a week or so later. It was pretty tough for me to deal with having to stay up here longer since I was really hoping to be home in January but I didn't come this far to mess around at the end. And I would much rather stay here a little bit longer now than head home and then have to come back.

I have also been dealing with a small blood clot in my upper right chest that was caused by my port. To treat the clot I had been giving myself Lovanox injections twice a day in my stomach and am now taking Coumadin as well. Dr. Reeder had me stop the Lovanox shots, but I will have to be on the Coumadin until the port is removed. Since I am done with my treatments and no longer need the port, I suggested that we just remove it, that way I can stop the Coumadin and not have to worry about the clot. Dr. Reeder agreed and with any luck they will be able to squeeze me into their schedule sometime tomorrow to have it taken out!

I promise that I will stop being lazy and update my blog more regularly... I hope that everyone has a great 2011, let's make it one to remember!

*** I also wanted to thank everyone that has been helping my dad out with remodeling his house so that I can live there when I return to Hawaii. I would list all of your names but you know who you are and I don't want to accidentally leave someone out. Thank you for your help and hard work, I truly appreciate it and I know that my dad does too!!!