Well look at that. I’m already late on my journal entries. I’ll make it up today by talking about quite a few topics one of which will be the procedure I had today to install the central line. But first I need to catch up from yesterday regarding how I was diagnosed and all the things that have lead me up to the brutal pain in my upper chest and shoulder that I am now feeling.
I guess it was the beginning of April of 2003 where I first figured out that something was not quite right inside of me. I was working for a company called El Paso Oil and Gas on the 7th floor of the Petrol Canada building in Calgary. At lunchtime I would run the stairs of the building since it was too cold for a run outside. The building was 47 floors of usable staircase. I was up to 2 “laps” of the stairs by then. Id feel exhausted after my workout but I figured it was simply the fact that I was climbing about 100 flights of stairs every second lunch hour. After a while I could barely manage one lap and I simply figured that I was overworking myself. We had a Chinook in Calgary after that and Caity and I tried going for a jog at lunch hour together. Now Caity is a fit girl, so I figured that she’d give me a good run for my money, but she was literally having to stop and wait for me every 5 minutes or so. Once again I figured that I was just overdoing things and left it at that.
Around the same time Caity and I decided to redo the floors in our rental house. It had old peel and stick tiles on the floor that were slowly starting to unstick, and we discovered underneath the tile was hardwood flooring. So we proceeded to rip up the tile and plywood and refinish the wood underneath. In the process of doing that I hit my shin with a hammer. I got a bruise from the hit, but come on, why wouldn’t I bruise, it was a hammer after all right? Problem is I can’t remember the last time I had a bruise, hammer hit or not.
On Easter weekend I came down with a mysterious fever, which included massive amounts of fluids exiting my body from both orifices. I got the same thing again a few weeks later but coincidently I had eaten Dairy Queen products before both fevers. I figured that the Dairy Queen I went to was not terribly concerned with hygiene so I vowed to stop eating there. I still to this day get a little queasy when I see a Dairy Queen.
Well, I started feeling worse overall and finally made the call to get a family doctor and get a checkup. I found a new clinic opening up and made an appointment, which is incredibly lucky considering the doctor shortage that Calgary has been experiencing for the longest time. First on the list was a history and bloodwork since I hadn’t been to a doctor in over 5 years. Come on, I’m a guy, we don’t get sick right? I had to fast the night before my blood work and I don’t deal well with lack of food in the slightest. I woke up in the morning to discover that Calgary’s ever-consistent weather had dumped over 30 centimeters of snow on the ground. There was no way in hell that I was going to fast again and our car has traction control so off I ventured into the unforgiving weather
An hour and a half later I made it to the lab, which is 5 minutes away from our house in good weather. On the way there I was almost hit by a bus and 5 other idiots in SUV’s who thought they could drive in a blizzard. There was no lineup at the clinic so I was in and out within 5 minutes. Another hour later and I was back home binge eating to my hearts content. That’s when the phone call came.
“Mr. Price?”
“Yes”
“We need you to come down to the doctors office right away”
“Why?”
“We can’t discuss that over the phone, but it is rather urgent that you come down immediately”
“Are you kidding me? Have you seen the weather out there?”
“Right now Mr. Price. You must come right now”
So Caity and I bundled up and braved the roads again to head to the doctors office. Within 5 minutes at the doctors I was told that my white blood cell count was 270,000 (normal is 7-10 thousand) and my spleen had grown down to my hip bone and was in danger of popping. The family doctor was hesitant to make a diagnosis other than “some kind of blood cancer. We were also informed that we already had a room reserved At the Peter Lougheed Hospital and we were to go there immediately. Shock is an understatement for what we were feeling that day as we slipped and slide our way to the hospital. We were ushered through the emergency room and into a room where I would experience my first bone marrow biopsy.
Now, about the bone marrow biopsy. It is the worst feeling I have ever felt. The basic procedure is to take a big F**king needle and jam it into your hipbone right above a butt cheek. Than the needle gets twisted and ground into the bone until it penetrates the outer bone and hits the soft marrow. Now with that big needle in the marrow, suction is applied and the bone marrow is sucked out. It’s the suction that’s the worst part. I can only describe the sensation as A BIG F**KING NEEDLE SUCKING OUT YOUR BONE MARROW!!!!. And that’s about it. It also hurts for about two days afterward and the nurses seem to have the need to capture the most possible back hair under the bandage as possible to make ripping it off that much more enjoyable.
After a couple of days in the hospital it was confirmed that I indeed had Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. There are other forms of Leukemia you could get but luckily CML is one of the less aggressive forms. Lucky me huh? At least I didn’t have to lose a nut like someone else I know J. The treatment from then on was a drug regimen that consisted of Hydroxyurea (a general blood cell killer to bring down my counts) and Allopurinol (to protect my kidneys from the increased waste being generated from all the dead blood cells). I stayed on various doses of that for three months and then switched to a wonder drug called Gleevec.
Now, even though Gleevec didn’t work for me it is one of the latest cancer fighting drugs on the market. It actively targets the cancer cells and leaves the rest of me alone. I just want to publicly thank the Novartis drug company for giving me the time to create my two bundles of perfection. Without Gleevec I would have needed the transplant much sooner and would likely never have been able to reproduce.
Gleevec is hugely successful in 99% of those who take it. It has actually been known to produce complete remission is a few of those who take it. I happen to be the 1% that it didn’t work on. It brought my leukemia cells down to 12% of total (Leukemia cells were 100% at the time of diagnosis), but my doctor was expecting 0%. 0 percent does not mean remission in this case since the body can be Leukemia free and still WANT to produce more Leukemia cells. In my case, the Leukemia was proving resistant to the treatment and had the potential to become more aggressive in the near future. A bone marrow transplant at this stage has a success rate of about 70% while the success rate of a more advance Leukemia is about 10% to 15%.
So that brings us up to today. Please keep in mind that what you’ve read so far is a very simplistic view of what Caity and I have gone through. If you want more info about the actual biology behind Leukemias or their treatment, there are a lot of books out there written by doctors. I am not a doctor. I’m also on a heavy dose of Dilantin and Tylenol 3’s so if your looking for more details regarding anything you’ve read, call me in a year, or go buy a book. I can however suggest several websites that were instrumental in preparing me for what was to come.
Anyway, like I promised somewhere in this entry I’ll talk about my central line insertion that happened earlier this morning. I now have a tube that enters my body about 2 inches above my right nipple, snakes under the skin to above my collarbone, and takes a left turn into a vein that leads directly to my heart. And yes, for those who were wondering about my nervousness from yesterday, I did it with nothing but local anesthetic. Currently I feel like I’ve been shot in the shoulder with a high-powered rifle. I can however say that I now know why everyone loves Tylenol 3. It’s my new best friend. It still hurts to do most head and neck movements and I had to ride home from the hospital holding the seatbelt away from my body, but the pain is nothing like it was before.
I want to send out a sincere thank you to Ted Parker and Wayne Sands who phoned me last night regarding my fear of the central line procedure. Both of you really helped me out last night and I made it through the procedure mainly based on the courage you gave me.
Well, the next round of Tylenol 3 and Dilantin is kicking in and I’m having trouble concentrating or hitting the right keys on the keyboard. I’m going to go, put my feet up and watch M.A.S.H. re-runs on TV. Tomorrow I’ve got my first round of chemo so tune in tomorrow for my thoughts on that. Same cancer time, same cancer channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment