Gamma Knife

The year my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer was my seventh grade year and I was really close to my dad. He was diagnosed in January and they did chemo therapy, which never really affected my dad, and radiation that also never really affected him. My dad was positive throughout this whole ordeal, just like he was with the glioblastoma, his first brain tumor, which was amazing because most people, the second time they are diagnosed with cancer become discouraged. My dad always kept a great attitude, which helped my mom, sister, and I deal with this horrible diagnosis. My dad was cleared in March from the lung cancer, which was great! I know I had never heard better news, my dad was in remission, and that didn’t mean he was cured, but to us it might as well have, we were all extremely happy, but that all changed very quickly.

                Less than a month after my dad was cleared from the lung cancer my dad an MRI just like he had, had every three months since his first diagnosis. This had became a pretty routine thing for us, once every three months my mom and dad would go to Terre Haute in the morning, after one of them dropped me off at school, eat at Cracker Barrel for breakfast, and then go to Indiana MRI over in Terre Haute and then go to Providence Medical Center and talk to Dr. Huh, my dad’s primary oncologist, and the one doctor who has stayed a constant throughout my dad’s entire battle with cancer. This time was different, they went to Cracker Barrel like always and it all seemed pretty normal, but my dad’s teeth had been hurting, which is something odd that has happened every time he has had a brain tumor. He did not mention this to any of us because he was afraid of what it could mean. Everything went normal, but then a little over a week later Dr. Huh called our house asking for my mom and dad to come back over to Terre Haute so they could discuss the results of the MRI, at this point we all knew something was wrong because Dr. Huh usually just gave us the MRI results over the phone.

It turned out that my dad had another tumor in his brain, but Dr. Huh told us it did not look like a recurrence of the glioblastoma, that it was probably a metastasized tumor from the lung cancer. This is when we first heard the term Gamma Knife. Gamma Knife, it’s a scary sounding term and at that time it was highly experimental and we had no idea if would work. A Gamma Knife is a form of radiation that is about a hundred different radiation beams all focused on one point it is highly potent and my dad’s procedure was one of the first performed in the state of Indiana. It was a success and my dad went back into remission shortly after.

 

Why?

For four years after the pneumonia episode my dad did really well. Pretty much the only time he had to visit the hospital was for tests, it finally looked like he was better. We all thought things were back to normal, except for the fact that dad couldn’t work.

On January 9, 2008 my mom, dad, sister, and grandparents all came to Crestwood to watch me participate in the geography, I was in seventh grade and I was not expecting to do very well in the geography bee, I was good at geography, but I had been in the geography bowl a few times before and never really did all that well in it, but this time I won! It was great, we were all shocked. When we went home, I was ecstatic, but my dad was acting weird, none of us knew what was wrong, but he seemed in pain, and not as excited as he normally would be for me.

I walked outside, where my dad was, and I could hear him yelling for somebody to call 911. I panicked and ran over to the kennel, where my mom was. I told her to call for an ambulance. In stead of just calling the ambulance she ran outside and found my dad who by then had made to his chair on the porch and was sitting down. He did not look very good. He thought he was having a heart attack which was extremely scary. None of us knew what to do. We called 911 and waited, they took forever! As we waited for the ambulance to show up, a thousand things were going through my mind just, questions like, why, why us?. It seemed like God was picking on us, even though I knew he wasn’t. After my dad’s initial diagnosis with cancer we had all grown a lot closer to God, before the diagnosis we attended church maybe every other Sunday and only prayed at holidays and on Sundays. After the diagnosis we began to attend church every Sunday, and since the diagnosis, there hasn’t been a day where I haven’t thanked God for everything we have, and asked him to just bless my dad and anybody else who has been in a similar situation. This was testing my faith, and I didn’t know it then, but my faith would be tested a lot more over the next couple of years. When the ambulance finally arrived we had been waiting for over half an hour and we were scared. They rushed my dad to the hospital, where they determined he wasn’t having a heart attack, just a panic attack and after some x-rays they also determined he had pneumonia. They put my dad on an antibiotic and told him to avoid stressful situations then several days later when he was not getting better the doctors ordered a MRI which showed that my dad had a mass in his lung that looked like it was cancer. My dad, after a very drawn-out process of endless testing was determined to have small cell lung cancer.

the first winter

The fall after my dad was diagnosed with brain cancer I started the third grade, which I was looking forward to because I was excited to be getting back to school and spending time with my friends, and I'm pretty sure my parents were looking forward to me going back to school so they wouldn't have to look for someplace for me to go when they went to Terre Haute for my dad's chemotherapy and radiation treatments. My grandparents on my mom’s side managed the kennel while my mom was busy taking my dad to his chemo and radiation treatments. Through all this my mom still managed to be there for me with all the stuff that was going on, she helped me with my homework when I needed it and talked to me when I had questions about what was going on with my dad. I appreciated everything my mom did, but I realize now, not as much as I should have.

The winter after my dad was diagnosed he began having chest pains, at first we thought he was having a heart attack which would normally be a scary thing for anybody, but for us it was amazingly frightening, and none of us knew what to do, so we called 911, then my sister. We all waited at my house for the ambulance to arrive, but it was taking forever. We finally called after twenty minutes and cancelled the ambulance; my sister decided it would be faster if she just took my dad to the hospital herself. We waited in Emergency Room waiting room for a doctor to tell us what they had found in the multiple tests they had performed on my dad, the X-ray was the most telling of all the tests. It showed fluid in my dad’s lungs, which meant he had pneumonia, which almost always super- severe in people on chemo therapy because they have a weaker immune system with fewer white blood cells. The doctor’s decided to keep my dad overnight in the hospital to monitor his chest pain and just keep an eye on him. They put him an antibiotic regimen that included antibiotics through an IV while he was in the hospital and some pills while he was still in the hospital and when he went home. My dad spent the first night in the hospital without any complications, but he stayed another night due to the fact he was a cancer patient in the midst of an extremely aggressive, but dangerous chemo regimen, which he handled very well. This episode scared my entire family; we all thought we were losing my dad to a heart attack after all he had already been through, which we could not believe, even though it was just for a while, I think this experience drew us all closer to one another and helped strengthen my dad’s resolve to beat cancer, which was already pretty strong. My dad ended up getting out of the hospital three days later, and had to take an antibiotic for a few days afterward.

Summer following the surgery

The remainder of the summer following my dad’s first brain surgery was extremely long, or at least it seemed like it. There were daily trips to Terre Haute or Indianapolis for doctor’s appointments, radiation treatments, or chemotherapy treatments. My mom had to run our family business which even without the treatments that would have kept her busy because during the summer we have thirty or more dogs consistently in the kennel which is pretty much a twenty-four hour a day deal because the dogs constantly need to be turned out, fed, or watered. So, that first summer my mom was run pretty much into the ground, but with the help of my sister, Andrea, my grandma, and my grandpa she managed to do it all, which I think is pretty amazing. My dad hated the fact that he couldn’t help my mom more, but he tried to do his part by mowing and turning dogs out, but him being sick made me take on a lot more responsibility than I ever had before, I started to take the trash out, mow some, but just out in the big, wide-open areas around the house because my mom didn’t rust me on the mower, help water the dogs in the kennel, and feed the inside dogs, this was a huge step up from the stuff I had done before, which was basically nothing.


After my dad’s operation the doctor’s had said a complication from the surgery could be blood clots, and several weeks after the surgery my dad started having swelling in his legs, which is a sign of blood clots. After a trip to Paris Hospital and a sonogram on his legs it was determined that my dad had multiple blood clots in both of his legs, which was scary because it doesn’t take much for a clot to move to your heart or brain and cause a heart attack or stroke. The clots if they were just one clot, instead of multiple clots they probably would have been minor, but with it being multiple clots the doctors were all very concerned and had my dad stay three nights in the hospital which worried all of us because you never want somebody you love to be in the hospital for any amount of time, for anything. My dad stayed and was put on blood thinners, one in a pill, and the other in a shot, that had to be given by a doctor or nurse, so two of my mom and dad’s friends came out to the house and gave my dad the shots every single day. My dad to this day is still on the pill form of the blood thinner because he is still at extremely high risk of developing another one which could be even more dangerous than it was back then because his leg is almost always swollen , which means there is no physical sign of a blood clot.

My dad getting the blood clots, taught me that even though they got all of the tumor through the surgery, other equally dangerous stuff suddenly pop up out of nowhere.

The Surgery And the Days After

My dad’s surgery was July 11, 2003, 19 days after his initial diagnosis. The surgeon was Dr. Scott Shapiro, the same guy who did Lance Armstrong’s brain surgery. The surgery began early in the morning and lasted six hours at Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana.


We spent the previous night at my aunt and uncle’s house near Indianapolis, it was the first time we had visited their new house and even though we were there for a very scary and sad reason I remember just thinking how huge it was, and how cool it was that we were staying there. My mom, dad, and aunt all left the house around 3:30 that morning to go to the hospital that was about an hour away, my uncle left the house around 7:00 for work, and me and my cousins got up sometime later that morning for a long day of just messing around and trying to keep my mind off of things.

I don’t remember much of the day of my dad’s surgery, but I do remember the phone call from my mom saying he was out of the operating room and in recovery. I just remember the sound of pure joy and happiness in my mom’s voice on the phone.

The surgery lasted around six hours which is about how long the doctor’s said it would take to remove the egg-sized tumor. At the time of the surgery we did not yet know that the tumor was cancerous, but the doctor’s thought it was from the way it looked. We were extremely relieved that the surgery went well and that Dr. Shapiro was able to remove the entire tumor.

While the surgery was a success we still had a long road in front of us. Once the tests on the tumor were completed we learned that the tumor was an extremely aggressive and, the one adjective nobody wants to hear, cancerous tumor known as Glioblastoma Multiforme. When my mom and dad were told the tumor was cancerous and would probably return sometime in the next five years my dad said, “I’m going to beat this; God’s got more for me to do here.” My dad had watched his dad, my grandpa, die of prostate cancer just ten years earlier, in 1993. He still talks about how he watched my grandpa waste away and eventually pass, and how devastating it was for him to watch that.

Two days after the surgery, I finally got to go visit my dad at the hospital. I was happy to see him, but when I was there they had his bandages off which meant the wound was exposed, and to this day, seven years later, that is still one of the nastiest things I have ever seen. I almost threw up and it made me so uncomfortable that I actually had to leave until they got the wound redressed. Something else that really scared me was how different my dad looked without hair. That is all I remember about my dad immediately after the surgery.

This experience taught me that cancer was an extremely real thing that could change the way you look at somebody.

The First Few Days

In June, 2003 my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor. At the time I really didn't know what that meant because I was eight, but I knew it was bad.
Starting in late May of 2003 my dad started having massive, crippling headaches which was kind of scary for me because at that age, your dad is superman, he's unstoppable, or at least mine was. I just remember him laying in his recliner all day, everyday because his head hurt so bad.

In 2003 my dad was kind of on a job carousel and he was about to start selling insurance for AFLAC when the headaches began. My dad had been a salesman almost his entire adult life, starting with fertilizer in the 1970's, to nuts and bolts, then tires, and finally insurance for AFLAC and he loved every second of being on the road because he got to work with people. The biggest thing that affected my dad was not that he had the tumor, it was that he wouldn't be on the road anymore, doing what he loved and i know to this day, almost 7 1/2 years later, this still kills him.

One day in early June, 2003 my dad had a meeting with an AFLAC sales representative to learn what he had to do to also become a representative for AFLAC, and when he got home he was having one of the headaches, but this one was more severe than any of the previous ones, it was so painful that he couldn't even get out of his truck without my mother's and sister's assistance. This headache was the last straw, my sister rushed me to my aunt and uncle's house, where I would spend the rest of the weekend and my mom rushed my dad to Carle hospital in Champaign, Illinois, where he would spend the rest of the weekend. This all happened on a Friday in early June, 2003.

Once at Carle my dad was given an MRI and several other scans to detect what was causing the headaches. When they did this the detected swelling in his brain, but they couldn't tell if it was a hemorrhage or a tumor, but after a few days of observation and a few more tests they learned it was a brain tumor the size of an egg on the left side of his head, near his temple. On the Monday after he was admitted at Carle my dad was released and told that they would do everything they could to combat the tumor and that it was operable, but they needed to operate as soon as possible. So, they operated less than one month later.

Dr. Schapiro, my dad's brain surgeon is one of the best in his profession, and I remember thinking how cool it was that he would be the one to save my dad's life. My dad during this whole process, wouldn't let me forget that, that's what he was going to do, save my dad's life. Looking back that was a ridiculous expectation but that's how my dad was/ is, he's an optimist and probably will be until the day he dies.

What I learned from this was that things change extremely fast and you never know what to expect, my dad in less than two months went from being a normal, happy, forty-eight year old salesman to a permanent patient and retiree.