Having cancer

It’s been a year (tomorrow) since I lost my dad to brain cancer. I just went back and re-read my posts and all of the supportive responses from you guys. I’m in a much better place now than I was a year ago happiness wise, but I still miss him dearly.

I really love this thread and the support we can provide each other, even with the bad news that often permeates this topic. QT3 as a community holds a special place in my heart and I appreciate you guys and your common experience.

Thumbs up Vesper. I agree with the sentiments you expressed about this place. I’m sorry for your loss and hope you get even happier in the years to come.

Well said, Vesper. I am trying to get to where you are slowly myself.

While they didn’t have cancer, I did lose both my parents this past summer to various forms of lung disease (mom in June and dad in Sept). My mom’s was slow and gradual and had a nice few years of good life that we didn’t expect so we were sort of prepared. My dad passed very quickly as it progressed much more rapidly than we all had hoped and stunned us all. He was literally going to drive himself to visit my sister when he checked himself into the hospital with an irregular heartbeat. They got that under control quickly, but his lungs deteriorated over the next 5 days and then he passed.

I had lots of plans that we were unable to do together, but we did get to do a few of the things we wanted during those two months. We are fortunate neither suffered, though, but adjusting has been hard, especially with the holidays upcoming.

Tomorrow, Ms. Wisdom heads in for what will technically be her seventh surgery in the last 26 months.

To recap the last couple year’s worth of posting, my wife has long-suffered from something called “endometriosis”, a condition that causes non-cancerous cysts to form on the exterior of her uterus and Fallopian tubes. These cysts are generally painful and can cause a lot of internal scarring and lead to infertility and whatnot.

A couple years back, she elected to have a hysterectomy to pretty much get rid of the pain. We’d had our kids anyway and didn’t want any others, so it wasn’t even a hard choice. But because she’s still fairly young (46 at the time) and wasn’t really anxious to go into early menopause, she kept her ovaries.

Then she got breast cancer and had a mastectomy, something unrelated to the endometriosis. That’s all chronicled upthread.

After the mastectomy she started to get spontaneous lung collapses, which is further detailed a few hundred posts above. That caused a looong hospital stay and three minor surgeries before finally culminating in a fairly major lung surgery to try and stop the pneumothorax episodes.

Turns out that the lung-collapses were actually related to the endometriosis. With no uterus to bedevil, the tissue that was causing the problems ended up migrating upwards into her chest cavity, forming little cyst/blisters on her right lung which would then pop and collapse her lung. And this material was being produced by her ovaries.

No sweat, the cancer drugs are supposed to be shutting down her ovaries. Her type of breast cancer (one of the more common types) is triggered partially by estrogen, so they give women a suppressant that pretty much shuts that down. Since the anti-cancer drugs should have put Ms. Wisdom into a mild form of menopause, her ovaries should have stopped producing the endometriosis tissue. Problem solved.

No such luck. For whatever reason, Ms. Wisdom was not responsive to the standard “tamoxofen” regimen. Her estrogen output did not drop hardly at all. I told her that this was simply because she is too much of a woman for modern medicine to handle… but this otherwise golden line didn’t even get me a chuckle because I meant that she had more lung-collapses to look forward to, not to mention a heightened risk of cancer.

So we went back the doctors and looked into alternate treatments. There was one other drug combo available: a daily pill and a monthly shot. This was great stuff - the pill’s chemicals cause severe joint-pain, and the shot is so painful that it has to be administered in the abdomen, like rabies shots. Oh, and the cost of the shot is $1700 per month… after insurance has paid 50% of it. We tried that for a couple months and elected not to continue. It wasn’t working anyway; the battle between medicine and my wife’s hormones was never going to be a contest.

The final option is to remove Ms. Wisdom’s ovaries. This will absolutely stop the endometriosis and it will permanently reduce the risk of her cancer coming back. The down-side is menopause hitting her like a brick taped to a bus, but it seems like the least-worst option at this point.


OK, that whole section up above was a story I told you so that I could tell you this next story:

The surgery is - as I mentioned above the previous wall-o-text - tomorrow. For a normal woman this would be a fairly simply laparoscopic procedure where they go in with the waldos, snip-snip, and then send her home. A couple of days of bed-rest with a few more days off of work, and that’s it.

But nothing’s ever that easy with Ms. Wisdom. With the hysterectomy, two C-sections, and the endometriosis causing scarring down there on a near-monthly basis for much of her life, the surgeon says there’s probably a 10% chance he can do this with the waldos. He’ll try, of course, but we’re prepared for him to cut her open old-skool. Like a trout.

If/when that happens we’re looking at a couple weeks of bed-rest followed by another month or two of recovery before she can go back to work.

So anyway - I will update this thread as things develop.

Good luck, Tin. My wife dealt with some similar (but less severe) stuff some years back. Hopefully she is back on her feet soon.

Damn, Tin. I hope the surgery goes well.

Pass our best wishes for a good outcome on to Mrs. Wisdom!

Good luck to Mrs.Tin Wisdom. Here’s hoping this leads to some relief.

So sorry your wife is having to go through all that, @Tin_Wisdom. Hope the surgery goes very well and brings her relief.

Got no words other than support and hope. Fingers crossed for you and your family, Tin.

Sending good vibes your way.

Tin, having spent a few hours chatting with you via Skype for our game now, the above stories suddenly snap into much clearer focus, as the wry, dry wit you bring to the proceedings must be very funny indeed. I understand your wife may not quite always appreciate the touches of humor, but I have to imagine they go a long way toward maintaining familial sanity.

Best of luck to you and yours tomorrow and going forward, man.

edit: woops was missing a key word up there.

You and your wife are in my thoughts. Here’s hoping the procedure tomorrow i goes as well as it can, with a minimum of complications.

All the best to you and your wife, @Tin_Wisdom .

I hope things go well @Tin_Wisdom . The two of you deserve a nice long break from medical worries. Btw menopause is different for every woman. Some transition and feel almost no difference, some actually feel better, and of course there are many who don’t like what it does to the body which you’re concerned with. My hope is with all the trouble her reproductive organs have given her, she will actually feel much better, great relief to finally be rid of them. Hugs!

I don’t know if it would defeat the purpose of the surgery reducing cancer risk, but you can take exogenous hormones to delay menopause if it’s really troublesome.

Thanks for all the well-wishing; I passed them on to Ms. Wisdom.

It took literally all day, but the surgery went exceptionally well - far better than I had steeled myself to expect. The surgeon was able to do the entire operation laparoscopically, which means that her recovery time will be measured in days rather than weeks or months; she was able to walk from the car to the couch under her own power and even climb the stairs without any real assistance. Tomorrow will be when the true pain hits her, but compared to her hysterectomy (which was also a laparoscopic procedure) this is 100 times better.

Wonderful news, man. Here’s to hoping for a speedy recovery (I mean, I guess she’s already been granted that, but even moreso!).

Sweet! Glad it turned out for the better for once.

-Tom

Great news! Here’s to a speedy recovery for Mrs. Wisdom and good vibes for the road ahead.