Surviving cancer, Part 1
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By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist
There have been some famous and surprising cancer cases recently. This is the way cancer strikes: You are going along, minding your own business, planning what you’ll do next, and cancer rears its ugly head.
Wikipedia describes cancer as “a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread.”
All cancers are not tumorous. Lymphomas and leukemias are called “soft tissue” cancers, because they do not form tumors.
On Friday, Feb. 11, 2000, 20 years ago, I received a call about 4 p.m. from a person whose name I do not remember, on staff at Emory University Hospital here in Atlanta, Ga. He told me the results of the biopsy on the lump on my neck had come back and I had cancer, Diffuse Large B Cell Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We had been watching the lump on my neck since December and it had been biopsied earlier that week.
First rule: Even doctors do not want to admit you have cancer.
That evening, Laura and I were going to a Valentine’s Day event at the Atlanta Zoo. They were doing these clever parties at Valentine’s Day to reveal the amorous activities of their various zoo residents. We went, and I don’t remember a thing that happened there. I was focused on my new status as a cancer patient – all kinds of things were racing through my mind. For instance, our oldest daughter was to be married that spring. Would I live long enough to attend the wedding?
The next week, we (Laura and I, she has been close by my side for this entire journey) met Dr. Elliott Winton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKCic8WEZk at Emory University Hospital.
One of our first questions was “Are we at the right place?”
We wanted to know if Emory was the best option or should we head to Hutchinson Institute in Seattle, MD Anderson in Houston, Mayo Clinic or perhaps Sloan Kettering in New York.
With discussions, we determined we were at the right place and high-quality treatment was fortunately available about an hour from our home there at Emory. We learned about the disease (they told us there were about 15 types of NHL) and set a course of treatment.
I had five rounds of chemotherapy (one every three weeks) as an outpatient, followed by 29 days of radiation on the lump on my neck, the lymph node where the cancer had first expressed itself.
My daughter got married in May, and I walked her down the aisle without a hair on my body. Some chemos are designed to kill fast-growing cells indiscriminately; hence, one loses every hair and their fingernails stop growing. To be clear, the radiation only lasts a few seconds, but you must drive to the hospital every day to get it. We joked that the drive across Atlanta was likely more dangerous than the radiation.
I was put on a three-month checkup schedule, which eventually stretched to six months, then to a year.
Life got back to normal, eventually. In 2005, I achieved a longterm dream of mine to solo drive the 48 contiguous U.S. in seven days (April 29-May 5, 2005).
In the fall of 2006, I was feeling tired much of the time. In October, I developed an abscessed tooth and went to the dentist. He sent me to a dental surgeon. After his work, we watched the base of the tooth for a while, and it kept growing. The dental surgeon referred me to another dental surgeon. His analysis: I had cancer in the base of the tooth. Back to Dr. Winton.
This time the diagnosis was Burkitt’s lymphoma. At this time, Burkitt’s lymphoma was showing up in people my age, people who had been teenagers in the 1960s, grown up on farms, drank farm well water, handled synthetic fertilizer and had handled tobacco plants. I was guilty on all counts.
It was Stage 4. However, at least in lymphomas, Stage 4 only means they have detected cancer cells on both sides of your diaphragm.
It was determined I should be hospitalized for chemotherapy treatment on a schedule of about two weeks in the hospital, one week home. This was with the caveat that if my temperature at home ever surpassed 101.5 degrees, I was to immediately come to the hospital and be readmitted.
I went into the hospital Thanksgiving Week 2006. From that week until April 2007, I spent every holiday in the hospital. They would try to send me home (such as for Christmas), but my temperature would spike and back in I would go. I tell people if you want to be clean, sleep or eat, don’t go to a hospital.
Doctor Winton told me there had been tremendous progress since my 2000 incident. Now, instead of 15 types of lymphoma, researchers had determined there were at least 150 types of lymphoma. The new drug, Rituximab, was available, too. It works by getting inside of cancerous cells and exploding them.
It was a very dark winter for me. I hate winters, anyway, and being in the hospital did not help. On top of the cancer wing, was the helipad and helicopters came and went all hours of the day and night. I had two pumps on a pole with usually six to eight bags of chemicals (and often blood transfusions) at a time being pumped into the port in my chest.
My good friend was talking to me one day on the phone and asked me what the thump-thump noise was in the background. I told him it was the pumps. Next thing I know, he had sent me a set of noise canceling headphones.
In the fall, when this started, Laura’s mother had some health issues. It became necessary to bring her to Emory from Valdosta, Ga. and then move her to Tell City, Ind., where she would be near more family. This was all accomplished before Jan. 1, 2007 while I was in the hospital.
In February, I developed a blood clot in my arm. This necessitated strapping my arm to a board and inserting a long device that was water cooled and vibrated about 2,000 times per second. After that, I had to learn to give myself shots containing a blood thinner in my legs. This went on for about six weeks.
The nurses called the pumps I mentioned “Fred.” One day when Laura was there (by the way, she stayed and slept in the chair nearly every night), I asked the nurses why the called the pumps “Fred.” They were not sure where it came from. I told them I knew. One time when I was in a paper mill in Finland a bunch of control engineers were fiddling with a similar pump that was feeding a chemical into the approach flow piping on a paper machine.
They called that pump “Fred.” I asked them why they called it by that name. In perfect English they said, “F--- Ridiculous Electronic Devices.” The next thing we knew, all the nurses were out in the hall whispering about the pumps.
I have always been a person of faith, and I prayed a lot that winter (and have ever since).
One of the rare evenings when I was alone, I got to searching on the internet for the life expectancy of someone like me. It made me very depressed. But I had a small revelation. Those life expectancy curves were made up of many points. I was just one of those points, I was not the whole curve. By myself, I was not a statistic, I was me. I resolved to never be a statistic again and I haven’t, I am uniquely me.
In April, it looked like I might live. Laura asked me if there was anything I wanted. I said yes. I wanted a motorcycle and a dog.
I had a friend who had a motorcycle, which he soon sold me. As for a dog, I wanted a cocker/terrier mix like the first dog I ever had when I was 6. I started looking at the animal shelter page for our county. They named the dogs that were up for adoption.
In a couple of days, a cocker/terrier mix showed up and they had named him Fred! Laura said, “Well, it’s a sign you must go get ‘Fred.’”
If you have read me for any length of time, you know Fred and I had quite an adventure driving around to paper mills for many years. Fred succumbed to heart failure in the spring of 2018. His ashes are in a cedar box on the mantle in our family room.
To be continued next week.
Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press. He may be reached at jthompson@taii.com.
HCP columnist
There have been some famous and surprising cancer cases recently. This is the way cancer strikes: You are going along, minding your own business, planning what you’ll do next, and cancer rears its ugly head.
Wikipedia describes cancer as “a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread.”
All cancers are not tumorous. Lymphomas and leukemias are called “soft tissue” cancers, because they do not form tumors.
On Friday, Feb. 11, 2000, 20 years ago, I received a call about 4 p.m. from a person whose name I do not remember, on staff at Emory University Hospital here in Atlanta, Ga. He told me the results of the biopsy on the lump on my neck had come back and I had cancer, Diffuse Large B Cell Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We had been watching the lump on my neck since December and it had been biopsied earlier that week.
First rule: Even doctors do not want to admit you have cancer.
That evening, Laura and I were going to a Valentine’s Day event at the Atlanta Zoo. They were doing these clever parties at Valentine’s Day to reveal the amorous activities of their various zoo residents. We went, and I don’t remember a thing that happened there. I was focused on my new status as a cancer patient – all kinds of things were racing through my mind. For instance, our oldest daughter was to be married that spring. Would I live long enough to attend the wedding?
The next week, we (Laura and I, she has been close by my side for this entire journey) met Dr. Elliott Winton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKCic8WEZk at Emory University Hospital.
One of our first questions was “Are we at the right place?”
We wanted to know if Emory was the best option or should we head to Hutchinson Institute in Seattle, MD Anderson in Houston, Mayo Clinic or perhaps Sloan Kettering in New York.
With discussions, we determined we were at the right place and high-quality treatment was fortunately available about an hour from our home there at Emory. We learned about the disease (they told us there were about 15 types of NHL) and set a course of treatment.
I had five rounds of chemotherapy (one every three weeks) as an outpatient, followed by 29 days of radiation on the lump on my neck, the lymph node where the cancer had first expressed itself.
My daughter got married in May, and I walked her down the aisle without a hair on my body. Some chemos are designed to kill fast-growing cells indiscriminately; hence, one loses every hair and their fingernails stop growing. To be clear, the radiation only lasts a few seconds, but you must drive to the hospital every day to get it. We joked that the drive across Atlanta was likely more dangerous than the radiation.
I was put on a three-month checkup schedule, which eventually stretched to six months, then to a year.
Life got back to normal, eventually. In 2005, I achieved a longterm dream of mine to solo drive the 48 contiguous U.S. in seven days (April 29-May 5, 2005).
In the fall of 2006, I was feeling tired much of the time. In October, I developed an abscessed tooth and went to the dentist. He sent me to a dental surgeon. After his work, we watched the base of the tooth for a while, and it kept growing. The dental surgeon referred me to another dental surgeon. His analysis: I had cancer in the base of the tooth. Back to Dr. Winton.
This time the diagnosis was Burkitt’s lymphoma. At this time, Burkitt’s lymphoma was showing up in people my age, people who had been teenagers in the 1960s, grown up on farms, drank farm well water, handled synthetic fertilizer and had handled tobacco plants. I was guilty on all counts.
It was Stage 4. However, at least in lymphomas, Stage 4 only means they have detected cancer cells on both sides of your diaphragm.
It was determined I should be hospitalized for chemotherapy treatment on a schedule of about two weeks in the hospital, one week home. This was with the caveat that if my temperature at home ever surpassed 101.5 degrees, I was to immediately come to the hospital and be readmitted.
I went into the hospital Thanksgiving Week 2006. From that week until April 2007, I spent every holiday in the hospital. They would try to send me home (such as for Christmas), but my temperature would spike and back in I would go. I tell people if you want to be clean, sleep or eat, don’t go to a hospital.
Doctor Winton told me there had been tremendous progress since my 2000 incident. Now, instead of 15 types of lymphoma, researchers had determined there were at least 150 types of lymphoma. The new drug, Rituximab, was available, too. It works by getting inside of cancerous cells and exploding them.
It was a very dark winter for me. I hate winters, anyway, and being in the hospital did not help. On top of the cancer wing, was the helipad and helicopters came and went all hours of the day and night. I had two pumps on a pole with usually six to eight bags of chemicals (and often blood transfusions) at a time being pumped into the port in my chest.
My good friend was talking to me one day on the phone and asked me what the thump-thump noise was in the background. I told him it was the pumps. Next thing I know, he had sent me a set of noise canceling headphones.
In the fall, when this started, Laura’s mother had some health issues. It became necessary to bring her to Emory from Valdosta, Ga. and then move her to Tell City, Ind., where she would be near more family. This was all accomplished before Jan. 1, 2007 while I was in the hospital.
In February, I developed a blood clot in my arm. This necessitated strapping my arm to a board and inserting a long device that was water cooled and vibrated about 2,000 times per second. After that, I had to learn to give myself shots containing a blood thinner in my legs. This went on for about six weeks.
The nurses called the pumps I mentioned “Fred.” One day when Laura was there (by the way, she stayed and slept in the chair nearly every night), I asked the nurses why the called the pumps “Fred.” They were not sure where it came from. I told them I knew. One time when I was in a paper mill in Finland a bunch of control engineers were fiddling with a similar pump that was feeding a chemical into the approach flow piping on a paper machine.
They called that pump “Fred.” I asked them why they called it by that name. In perfect English they said, “F--- Ridiculous Electronic Devices.” The next thing we knew, all the nurses were out in the hall whispering about the pumps.
I have always been a person of faith, and I prayed a lot that winter (and have ever since).
One of the rare evenings when I was alone, I got to searching on the internet for the life expectancy of someone like me. It made me very depressed. But I had a small revelation. Those life expectancy curves were made up of many points. I was just one of those points, I was not the whole curve. By myself, I was not a statistic, I was me. I resolved to never be a statistic again and I haven’t, I am uniquely me.
In April, it looked like I might live. Laura asked me if there was anything I wanted. I said yes. I wanted a motorcycle and a dog.
I had a friend who had a motorcycle, which he soon sold me. As for a dog, I wanted a cocker/terrier mix like the first dog I ever had when I was 6. I started looking at the animal shelter page for our county. They named the dogs that were up for adoption.
In a couple of days, a cocker/terrier mix showed up and they had named him Fred! Laura said, “Well, it’s a sign you must go get ‘Fred.’”
If you have read me for any length of time, you know Fred and I had quite an adventure driving around to paper mills for many years. Fred succumbed to heart failure in the spring of 2018. His ashes are in a cedar box on the mantle in our family room.
To be continued next week.
Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press. He may be reached at jthompson@taii.com.