Thankful for medical advancements...

What am I most thankful for this year?  Medical advancements!

At the end of August, Mark came home from work one night flinching and made a comment that he may need to go to the doctor about the sharp pain he was feeling in the center of his abdomen.  Knowing my husband, a man who tried to heal his own broken arm several years ago, would NEVER ask to go to the doctor unless it was serious.  The next morning I took it upon himself to call his doctor and schedule him an appointment before he decided he didn’t need to go.  After an exam and some bloodwork the GP decided to send him to get a CT to look for a hernia, I knew if one was found that we were looking at needing to surgically repair it, something that I was not looking forward to considering that I was needing surgery to remove my non functioning gallbladder and knew what the medical bills would be looking like should we need two surgeries.  I bit down that worry because I’ve come to accept that medical is not something to put aside until you can afford it.  I’ve learned this lesson the hard way and I’m having to live with the ramifications of that for the rest of my life.

CT was done and results showed what was causing the pain, diverticulitis, something that could be treated with a prescription.  Awesome!

If only that was all they found...

The nurse on the phone informed him that he needed to come in and talk to the doctor about the “spot” they found.  She wouldn’t say what the spot was, only that the doctor needed to tell him about it.  A little while later the online health app showed a new condition - a renal mass.  After googling while waiting for the doctor appointment two days later we were looking at possible kidney cancer.  I wish now we could go back to dealing with a possible hernia - that sounded really good about now.

The doctors appointment was a joke - yes I understand that some news is best given in person but after the beans were already spilled that there was a spot and your health app told us what it was they should have just come out with it instead of making us come in and pay another copay just to find out the size of the mass, which was 2 cm by the way, and to be told that they sent a referral to an urologist.

After weeks of waiting for the referral I finally took over and got his appointment scheduled in October.  Apparently the doctors office had provided all the wrong contact information to the referred doctors which I got corrected and made sure all of the incorrect information was removed from their records.

The appointment at the urologist was just as frustrating.  The CT scan was not on file and we had to drive down to imaging to get the CD for the doctor to review.  The diagnosis did not change - we were indeed looking at a renal mass on the kidney which 90% of the time these masses are indeed cancerous, however his is still small but it needs to come out.  The doctor recommended removal via laparoscopic surgery where they remove part of the kidney which would be pretty painful and would keep him out of work for about 6 weeks.  If he had a desk job or even the ability to be put on light duty the time off would not be as significant, nevertheless this is what we were having to plan for.

Then came the doubt, was the doctor who did more prostate removals than anything else the best fit to cut out part of a kidney - which one of the major risks was severe bleeding?  After talking to multiple people and some other doctor friends the decision was made to have the procedure done down at the Mayo Clinic where they do these procedures hundreds of times a month.

We met with the Mayo urologist earlier this month.  They went over everything, all of the options, risks, follow ups, what we were looking at and answered every question we had.  The curveball we got there was a new option - thermal ablation - basically freezing the mass in place - killing it where it sits.  Most of the time this is not an option but in Mark’s case his is located in the perfect place and is still small enough for this to be a viable option with the same results as the removal with virtually no pain and a much shorter recovery time.  Ok - let’s look at this option further- couldn’t hurt.

The thermal ablation is done by the international radiology oncology team, which we decided the word oncology was to be replaced with “oh shit” cause that didn’t sound as scary.  The earliest they could get us in to speak to the doctors in the radiology department was today, the day before thanksgiving.  Last night we drove down to Jacksonville and stayed the night as opposed to getting up at 5 am to make the 8:45 appointment (mostly for my sanity since I’m pretty sure I would throw up if I had to wake up that early).

I feel like our prayers have been answered.  We are no longer looking at a long painful recovery, no longer looking at weeks of out of work (which would be without pay as all of his vacation would be used up in the first two weeks out), nope, now we are looking at leaving the hospital the same day with a bandaid covering the small needle incision and out of work for a week.

On December 20th they will insert two probes into the mass and will either freeze or boil the mass and the surrounding tissue to kill all of the cells in that area.  We opted out of doing any type of biopsy’s as the risks of infecting any of the surrounding area while taking out the sample was more than what we wanted to risk just to know if his mass fell in the 10% chance of being benign.  We are ok with leaving the dead tissue in his body as there are no adverse affects of doing so.  After the procedure is done he will have to go for CT scans periodically for the next 5 years but that’s it.  Being that the word cancer is in the picture and the only follow up is a CT every few months, I think we are coming out on the extremely lucky side.

Since we didn’t really know what was going on we have been very quiet about this whole thing, mostly due to not really wanting to think about it - cancer is some scary shit.  Now that he is in the hands of the extremely capable doctors down at the Mayo Clinic Mark has given the ok to share.

As I look back at this journey I can see the way we have been watched over - all of my worries have been handled and I know that everything is going to be ok.  So this Thanksgiving I am extremely thankful for the advances in medicine that have lead us to where we are today - for the stomach pain that accidentally found the mass early which has paved the way for the treatment option he will be getting.