Cure Kevin

It all started on Friday, May 26, 2006, the Friday before Memorial Day. I remember the day distinctly; it was the start of a beautiful long weekend with picnics and campouts planned. I was walking out to my car on my way to work and I coughed and threw up. Just like that… no warning, no sick feeling, no nausea, nothing. I remember leaning over the grass as I was throwing up thinking, “Man, this is weird”. So weird in fact, that I went on to work thinking it was just a fluke.

By lunch time, I wasn’t feeling that great and decided that it would be best if I took the rest of the day off, so I headed home and spent the rest of the evening examining the intracacies of our toilet bowl; It was not a good night.

Saturday, I rested and felt a lot better and by Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t eating much, but I felt good enough to take all the nieces and nephew’s camping at our In-laws (its kind of an annual tradition for the kids). The rest of that week, I was pretty queasy, but was keeping some food down. By the following weekend, I started throwing up again and decided that it was time to call in the professionals and I made an appointment with our family doctor.

After describing the symptoms and adding the fact that I was a regular Advil user (since my back surgery in January), the doctor thought I had an ulcer brought on by a bacteria called ‘h.pylori’. Blood tests would determine if they were right, so off I headed to the lab. The next day, the doctor’s office called and gave me the great news, “your blood work is fine.” Hmmmm… “Fine”?? Then why am I still not able to eat and keep food down? No explanation… “Wait a couple of days and if its still a problem give us a call”. That’s just what I did… and they never called back.

By now, I had lost about 15 pounds (hey… I could stand to loose twice that, but the diet was definitely not much fun), so I decided to call a specialist. The doctor was great about getting me in just before his vacation and he, too, thought I had an ulcer brought on by my Advil usage. A hasty shuffle of schedules and I was in the queue for an endoscopy the next day so they could see exactly what was going on. With a camera down my throat, the doc found that my stomach was just fine. He thought it might be Pancreatitis, an infection in my pancreas and, if that was the case, it would be gone in a couple of days. “Call us back in a couple of days if you still have problems”.

Well, a couple of days went by and I’m still sick and not eating, so I called the doctor and this time the Wheels of Modern Medicine start to turn. I was scheduled for an abdominal ultrasound… nothing (although Daisy, the Ultrasound Tech was very cute). Then came the Hidascan to see if my gall bladder was working; again, nothing. The final hope was a CAT Scan (fair warning… that contrast drink is nasty no matter how you try to cover up the taste!).

The scan was scheduled for Friday, June 23 and the scan itself was pretty uneventful, just drink the nasty contrast drink and breathe when they tell you to. At the end I casually asked the technichian if she saw anything unusual, and she mentioned that a radiologist would review the scans and if they found anything, they’d call the doctor and I’d hear from them. Otherwise, it would be a couple of days before I got the results. If you listen close you might be able to hear the Voice Of Doom here; I wasn’t paying attention and missed it.

Sure enough, that afternoon I got a call from the doctors office. Could I come by and discuss the results of the CAT Scan? It was then than I started to faintly pick out that Voice Of Doom, but hey, how bad could this be?

The Nurse Practitioner, Kathleen, called my wife and I into the examination room and uttered the four words that have changed my life forever: “We found a mass”. I could tell from the look on Kathleen’s face that this was no minor event and in fact, was probably quite serious.

Kathleen went on to tell us that the mass was on my pancreas and that, to complicate matters more, it was pushing on the major vein that runs through my abdomen and had caused a blood clot. The clot was serious enough that I had to be admitted to the hospital. I started thinking about what I would need to go home and get when Kathleen tells me that we’re going to the emergency room now. This caught both Melanee and I completely off-guard; here I was, someone who had never even spent the night in the hospital being told that I wasn’t going home that night, and probably not for a week or so. Off I go to the emergency room of Midstate Hospital in Meriden where I was poked, prodded, and put on blood thinners to get the clot under control.

By now, all we knew was there was a mass on my pancreas, but not what the mass was. It was decided that they needed a closer look, so an Endoscopic Ultrasound was scheduled at Yale Hospital in New Haven. After a short ambulance ride and another tube being stuck down my throat, the doctors confirmed that the mass was in fact cancer and they found lessions on my liver as well. A laproscopic biopsy of my liver confirmed that those lessions were cancerous too. This made my cancer Stage IV and officially inoperable. Friday, June 30, 2006 was a very dark day for us.

Word was spread to family and friends of my condition. This was probably one of the hardest things we’ve ever had to do; call up the people you love and tell them you have a terminal disease and there’s nothing they can do about it. There were a lot of very tearful phone calls, some I wasn’t sure I would ever get through.

One of those calls was to my good friend Geoff Fox, who is a meterologist for one of the local TV News stations. One of his co-workers is Dr. Mel Goldstein, who is a long-time cancer survivor himself and has done a tremendous amount of work in promoting cancer funding and awareness. It turns out that Dr. Mel knows the former head of the National Cancer Institute and after pulling some strings (I’ll probablly never know how many, but am greatful for every single one!) put me in contact with the head of the Cancer Center at Yale/New Haven Hospital, Dr. Edward Chu.

Dr. Chu was very quick in getting back to me and before I knew it, I had a appointment with the Pancreatic Cancer Expert at Yale, Dr. Saif. He took me off a lot of the drugs that Midstate had me on, put me on a TON of other drugs, and told us about a new program that he was working on that he would like me to participate in. The drug was called Genexol-PM and was a new delivery mechanism of an older drug; one that had not been used for pancreatic cancer before. Hey, if I can get on the cutting edge of something that’s gonna cure me, then I’m all for it!

Unfortunately, we had an appointment with the Oncologist at Midstate as well and she was less than enthusiastic about the program. Now we were thoroughly confused… who do we believe? Once again, Family to the rescue! My brother-in-law, Duane, runs a hospital in Oregon and they have a cancer center there. A quick call to my sister Tami and I was soon talking to their chemo expert who assured me that Dr. Saif’s program was a good way to go. To further put our minds at ease, my brother-in-law Doug, who is having is own struggles with renal cell carcinoma (kidney cancer that has metastasized to his lung) in California, connected me with a good friend of his who is a cancer reseacher and, again, the validitiy of Dr. Saif’s program was verified; we signed up.

My wife and I have gotten used to the fact that we measure our life in terms of CAT Scans now; our bathroom now looks like the local pharmacy, and I’m having to get used to being just tired all the time. The rest of the story is now a work in progress… follow along with me on the main blog!