It was March 31, 2008 and I my alarm woke me up at 7AM as it usually did. However, this wasn’t a normal morning. I was throwing up in the morning for the past 2 weeks. I went to doctors at Kaiser Permanente to get blood tests and everything seemed fine. They always had me in the room with the little bed thing and the weird wallpaper with the clowns or fish or something like that. They would just look at me and they didn’t really do much beyond using their stethoscope. I was even going to more than two or three doctors to get different opinions and they all had the same thought.
I was just perfectly fine. I was just having some hormonal imbalances. There wasn’t even any evidence to support that. As I was throwing up, I had this feeling in the back of my head as if it were about to explode. I was screaming in pain. My mom finally said, “That’s it! I’m taking you to the emergency room. ” The ER nurse rushed me in front of a couple of people, asked me some questions like how long had this been going on and where and how bad was the pain. I said a couple of weeks, and the pain has been in the back of my head and it was like 10/10.
As I was laying in a gurney, I was being rolled into a room with a machine that looked like a cylinder laid on it’s side with a hole in the middle like a donut. This was like an X-Ray machine, only it would be able to look at organs like the heart, the lungs, and the brain. In this case, they wanted to scan my brain. When they put me in through the center of this machine, I threw up again. I was lucky I aimed it outside the machine. As they cleaned it up, they did the scans they needed to do. They were done and they put me in a gurney.
They then pushed me into the ER and pushed me into a little space where I had a little curtain in my bed and a small IV machine sitting next to me with all of those heart monitor things. Soon, a nurse came in with some pain meds in an IV bag about as big as my head, stuck a butterfly needle in my arm, started the machine, and said a doctor would be back really quick with the scan results. An hour passed, and nobody came around. Another hour and a nurse came in to check on the IV and said the doctor was coming. Two more hours and not one, not two, but 5 INTERNS and an attending doctor came in. I said “What the hell is going on?
We’ve been waiting here for hours?! ” Finally, one of them stepped up and said “We’ve looked at your scan, and we are sorry to inform you that you have a brain tumor. ” The guy went on about surgery and other stuff but all I remember after that is whispering to my mom that it was going to be okay, over and over again. It was all a blur. I needed surgery. I was even told that the tumor was big enough to have been able to kill me in my sleep and that I was very lucky to be alive as long as I had been. Although, they didn’t have any room in their Pediatric ICU for some reason so they sent me to another hospital all they way in LA on Sunset Blvd.
Lucky for me, my surgery was done by one of the best pediatric brain surgeons in the country. Next thing I know, I was rushed into an ambulance which took me to a LA Kaiser Permanente and rushed into emergency brain surgery. Two more holes in my head and I’d be a bowling ball! – CafePress. com * Before the surgery, my dad promised to get me a steak dinner for having good grades that year. What I am about to explain is a story that has been told to me several times by nurses, doctors, and family members. I have absolutely no recollection of this momentary chaos whatsoever.
This happened a few days before I woke up and I was totally conscious. I had been under for a couple of days and the doctors couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t waking up. It was probably the anesthesia, but I think it was because I didn’t sleep at all for the past few weeks. I was really just making up for lost time. Anyway, I didn’t wake up after 24 hours and my family was getting worried. When my doctor ordered a blood test, the results came back showing that my oxygen levels were really low and that I wasn’t breathing right or something like that. They had to stick a breathing tube down my throat.
My parents gave them consent to give me the automatic breathing tube thing and they stayed with me some more. My doctor told them that it would also be a good idea if they gave me restrains in case I wake up and panic. They were okay with it. They had been with me for quite some time until they realize they haven’t had anything to eat since I was sent to surgery. So, they talked to the doctor to tell that they would be right back and went down to get some food. Just 10 minutes pass and they get back up when they see the doctor falling to the ground and a nurse knocked out cold on the ground.
My doctor ordered another blood test to see how I was doing. The nurse was about to draw blood from my arm when I had suddenly awoken in some kind of adrenaline induced rage. When my parents came in, they saw me push down the doctor and he looked like he slipped on a banana peel before he fell on his butt. As a witness explained to my parents and how they later explained it to me, I woke up in some kind of rage mode. I’ve never really been in a fight or flight situation but I now know that I would fight.
When I woke up with the tube in my throat, I broke the restraints and pulled it out. As I was pulling it out, a nurse was trying to hold me down and I knocked her down to the ground like the Hulk. When the tube was out, I was screaming bloody murder. It was the kind of scream you would hear when someone goes into a rage fit like Pat did in Silver Linings Playbook when he couldn’t find his wedding video. At that moment, my parents were walking into the room. They saw the mess that I made with the nurse that was down on the floor and the doctor calling for help.
Quickly, some nurses came in, pushed me down, and gave me some sedatives. I was out cold. I will always be remembered at that hospital in LA because that’s never happened before in their pediatric ICU. Also, they would never forget that I yelled at my dad, “Where the hell is my steak?! Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. – Winston Churchill I was absorbing a lot of information at the same time. It was supposed to be one of the hardest experiences in my life but it felt a little easier than I thought. Of course, I thought too soon.
One of the doctors who were involved with my surgery came to us and spoke to us in a very sincere tone about how I was going to change a few things about my lifestyle and how I would take on physical therapy at a certain point. Dr. Robert M. Cooper, MD and Dr. Jerry C. Cheng, MD. Two of the first doctors that saved my life. Not only did they tell me that the brain tumor was cancerous, but that I also had some splotches on my spine that needed to be checked out. So they ordered a spinal tap. It wasn’t as painful as the surgery, but it was a very strange experience.
They scheduled it so they could surgically insert my catheter right after the spinal tap in the operating room. It was so strange. Right before the surgery, Dr. Cooper can in and asked me if it would be okay if he could just use local anesthesia for the spine to maybe try to avoid another incident. He heard about the story too. I accepted, and it wasn’t really completely numb. Although, the feeling of a needle going into your spine isn’t so bad. It’s kind of like when you are sitting in bed and you feel this knot in your back. After the surgery, I had a Broviac catheter in my chest and a little dot on my spine where the needle was.
The results were great. My spinal fluid was clear of any cancerous cells which means the tumors growing on my spine weren’t cancerous. That was better because that made my cancer stage 3 instead of stage 4. After that, I would start what I would like to call Round 1. Every week day for six weeks, I would be given a bag of chemotherapy agent fluids my veins called Carboplatin. I woke up every morning at 6AM to go with my mom or dad to Los Angeles. It would always take us about 2 hours because of traffic. We’d get there at 8 they’d start setting up the bag of chemo I would be receiving in a special room and that would take another hour.
The chemo would go in through the Broviac for thirty minutes and I would rush across the street to get my radiation therapy. The way they explained to me why they did it like that was that the chemo would weaken and slow down the cancer cells while it makes it a lot easier for the radiation to work and kill the cancer cells. I would do that and then eat lunch with whoever took me and go home where I would rest until I would go through the routine again the next day. Only thing was, they also gave me some stuff called Vincristine every Friday for those six weeks.
It was a stronger chemo that does more damage and kills whatever cancer cells were weakened but not completely taken care of for that week. Throwing up a few times a day, really dark skin from radiation poisoning, no hair whatsoever. I was a mess, but the doctors knew that I was getting better. So, they gave me a break for a month so I could go to my 8th grade graduation ceremony. All of my friends and teachers were really happy to see me that day. It was a lot of fun. After a couple of months of getting stronger again, they decided to kick it up a notch in round two.
This time, it was a cocktail of some really bad stuff that I can’t even remember. Every month starting from August to January, I would spend a week in the hospital where I would be getting a steady stream of chemo and then sent home after they gave me another shot of Vinchristine. I would go home for a few weeks to recover and then they pushed me down again. Good thing I didn’t have any radiation. They finally finished knocking me down on January 7th when I got my final dose of Vinchristine and I moved on with my life. I keep dreaming of a future, a future with a long and healthy life, not lived in the shadow of cancer but in the light.
– Patrick Swayze It has been almost 5 years since my diagnosis. I am so lucky to be alive. There are a lot of things that have gone wrong in my life but this was really a blessing in disguise. My parents were planning on moving to Vegas and taking me with them. With the things that are going on in Vegas now, it was a really good thing that we didn’t go. They bought the house, and they promised me that I could have one more year of school here in California before we moved out there so I could say goodbye to my friends. I didn’t even want to go, but as soon we found out that I had brain cancer, they sold the house.
We stayed here in Fullerton and we’re glad we did. My dad was able to see his father live for one more year before he passed away. We were able to get a free vacation from the Make-A-Wish foundation and they treated us like royalty over there in Florida. The airline pilot even noticed my Make-A-Wish t-shirt and he invited me into the cockpit after the flight landed to look around. It was amazing to see just how many buttons and controls were in that little space. We went to every park in Disneyworld free. They gave us a week pass for each park along with passes for SeaWorld and Universal Studios.
I even got to meet my grandfather’s brother. It was so weird meeting him for the first time. I cried when I saw him because he looked so much like my grandfather. It was a great experience. I am never going to forget it. A couple of years later which happened to be last year in 2012, my mom met a hairstylist through a friend at work who happened to have a daughter who was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma around the same I had brain cancer. I thought that was a coincidence. What was really the biggest coincidence was that she is also Romanian. That really blew my mind. It was as if fate had brought us together.
If I didn’t have cancer, I would have moved to Las Vegas, I would have missed the last year of my grandfathers life, and I would never have met Michelle. I this point, I just had this feeling like it was an act of God and that I was supposed to meet her. We have been good friends and we’ve been hanging out and talking to each other since we met. Our families even plan on going on vacation together in Las Vegas at a hotel and celebrating some birthdays in April. Her birthday is on the 13th, like my grandfathers (scared the crap outta me when I found out), and my mom’s birthday is on the 22nd, which happens to be Earth Day.
We’re going to go in between those birthdays and celebrating on the strip. Just like ever cancer survivor our there should live their lives, we try to live our lives to the fullest. I like to go on adventures, driving to places I’ve never been and eating food I’ve never tried. The most interesting thing I’ve done was eat sheep stomach but I’m sure I haven’t even scratched the surface. I soon realized that the day I was diagnosed with brain cancer, I and my family was given a second chance at a better life.