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Humble Pie is On My Menu

We’ve got a down weekend out here in Houston. I miss home. We feel like we’ve been gone for a month. I know I have gained five pounds since we got here. It is always so much fun to explore new places to eat. Restaurants that are different from the places we always go at home. Houston is a huge city. Six and a half million people of all kinds. With such a large medical community (I heard M. D. Anderson employs 14,000) there are people from every corner of the world in this city and authentic restaurants are here to serve them the food they eat at home. We have enjoyed exploring the tastes and ambiance of these mostly tiny places. It has been particularly nice to be able to hook up with Susan and Fred Morgan from Columbus who are both fighting the fight and making the best of what M. D. Anderson Cancer Center has to offer them, just like me.

Jill and I were in an elevator this morning at M.D.A. heading for a consultation with the anesthesia department in advance of my needle biopsy, which now is scheduled for Monday at 1 p.m. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll be leaving here on Tuesday headed back to God’s country.

I have really screwed this trip up, though. With the exception of Dr. Ken Ogan, who is the Emory Urologist who performed my robotic, laparoscopic nephrectomy in June of 2009, every doctor who has touched me has been a friend of mine. Some closer than others, but I have known them, played golf with them, ridden bikes with them, drunk beer with them. That makes for pretty casual meetings when we’re in their offices before or after a procedure. That luxury has yielded incredible results for us personally and medically. I have been well cared for.

I’ll just say, that “stuff” doesn’t play out here. For the most part, these doctors are the best of the best in the world. I went into our meeting with the surgeon, who is really the only person I absolutely wanted to see out here, with a bit too much of the same casual demeanor that I have come to expect in my doctors’ visits over the past three years. It didn’t go well. At all. I asked too many questions. Leading questions. He didn’t want to be led. At all.

I am going to do whatever I have to do to repair the damage I might have caused. This guy is a great surgeon. I’m sure there are others, but I don’t know them. I want Dr. Chris Wood to be my surgeon. I’m about to take a big gulp of humble pie, or whatever else I have to do to get things back on track. God, I miss Andy Pippas. Brilliant, kind, devoid-of-ego, mad scientist Dr. Andrew William Pippas. We’ve got some stuff to talk about the next time I see him.

So the biopsy will be done on Monday. It is almost certainly going to indicate a cancerous tumor on my left adrenal gland. Dr. Wood wants a six-month regimen of Sunitinib (Sutent). I haven’t discussed this with Dr. Pagliaro, my M. D. Anderson “team leader.” I think he’s going to be surprised that Dr. Wood doesn’t think an immediate surgery is what I need. I left my appointment with Dr. Pagliaro this past Monday thinking surgery was probably a slam dunk.

I do not want to take that drug, unless there is a clear, logical reason for me to do so. I’m not convinced that time is now. But what do I know? We’re only talking about my life.

July 20, 2012 | Tagged With: adrenal gland, Columbus GA, Dr. Andrew Pippas, Dr. Christopher Wood, Dr. Ken Ogan, Dr. Lance Pagliaro, Emory University Hospital, Fred Morgan, Houston TX, Jill Tigner, kidney cancer, M. D. Anderson, Sunitinib, Susan Morgan, Sutent| Filed Under: kidney cancer | 11 Comments

Fred Was Wearing a Hoodie

Let me give you a great piece of advice right here at the top: If you get stricken with a serious illness that is going to require you to see a bunch of doctors AND accurately recount the dates and times of stuff you’ve had done medically for you and to you over the years, start out from the day of your diagnosis and WRITE IT ALL DOWN!

We reported today at 9:00 a.m. for my 9:30 appointment on the 7th floor at elevator U in the Mays Clinic of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. We finally saw the doctor at 2 p.m. For some reason it was comforting to know that even a world-class, mega-cancer center is too busy to stay on schedule for appointments. But first, let me back up a bit.

Last night after a gloriously authentic Tex-Mex dinner at El Tiempo Cantina, we were gassing up the car and my phone rang. I looked down at the screen and saw my card playing buddy, Fred Morgan’s, name. I refused the call, cause I still think if you answer a cellphone while gassing up your car you could end up in flames like a freebasing Richard Pryor. Since I am really not in shape to run down the street, regardless of whether or not I happen to be in flames, I decided to call Fred back.

Then it hit me. I had planned to call Fred and Susan (he’s just getting over cancer surgery our here at M. D. A.) and see if there was anything we could bring them from the homeland. I could pack my pockets full of Krystal hamburgers, Country’s BBQ or a Dinglewood scrambled dog. But NO, I was caught up in my own little world, I didn’t think to call them until we were four hours out of Houston. What was I going to do then? “Hey Fred, can I bring you a Lone Star beer?”

So, I called him back and was apologetic about not thinking to call them earlier and we discovered that we were both due at the same waiting room within 15 minutes of the other the next morning and decided to meet up this morning. Standing next to me, Fred looks like a very skinny version of the Unibomber. Here I am, dressed all in black trying to look svelte and he strolls up with that freshly surgerized swagger in a hoodie. If I was a neighborhood watch director, like my friend, Rick McKnight, I might of put a cap in Fred, all hoodied up like that. Once I checked his ID and knew him not to be an innocent, young black man who might be out to do me harm, we had a nice visit over a cup of Joe and moseyed up to our appointment.

After we checked in, we were handed an itinerary and assigned another waiting room. They triaged me (checked my BP, temperature and pulse) and we waited again. We were called back to an exam room at around 11:45. A young M. D. Anderson Fellow, Dr. Kwang, spent about an hour with us going over my history. Why I didn’t think to grab my iPad and call up that March, 2012 blog post that chronicled my history from diagnosis until today is beyond me! I stumbled over dates and times and treatments. It was like a reenactment of one of Basset and Becker Alzheimers poker games, where Fred Morgan, Bill Becker, Jack Basset, Bobby Smith, John Kelly, Ted Short and Berry Henderson and I sit around without a single shred of ability to remember what game we’re playing, who has bet or even what day it is.

We stressed the importance to Dr. Kwang that we are traveling from afar and that we would like to move things along quickly and that if surgery is required, we’d like Dr. Christopher Wood to do it and preferably now. Once he gave us a thorough going over, he came back with Dr. Lance Pagliaro. Not that it matters, I was surprised to see Dr. Pagliaro, roll into the exam room in a wheel chair. He greeted us and went over his discussions with Dr. Kwang and their review of my extensive file and all the scans we had brought with us.

Here is his conclusion: “Mr. Venable, the cancer you have seems to not be an agressive cancer. It appears that you have only one site of metastasis and it definitely can be managed surgically. We’d like to do our own CT scans, a brain MRI, a bone scan,  a chest x-ray and blood work. We’ll schedule them quickly over the next couple of days and I concur with your request to have Dr. Chris Wood do your surgery if surgery is required,” he said.

If he was the olympic wordsmith that I claim to be, he would have busted out the word “indolent” this morning. Indolent has become one of my very favorite words. It has, thankfully, been used on numerous occasions to describe my slowly progressing cancer. So, we’re here for the week. I have a brain MRI and a bone scan tomorrow. We hope to meet with Dr. Chris Wood on Wednesday for a surgical consultation. The CT scan and x-ray are scheduled for Thursday. That is all we have on the agenda for now.

Dr. Pagliaro went on to say that, “considering the passive nature of your disease, you could live for a long time by addressing these single mets surgically. You could always go on one of the many other therapies available to you that are FDA approved and then after that there are always clinical trials.” I recall what Dr. Dan George at Duke University Hospital told us when he said, “I have thousands of patients who would trade places with you in a heartbeat.” We appear to have been dealt something of a tentative inside straight. Not the straight flush we had wanted, but definitely better than that 7-high hand that so many of the people we have been among on this day have in their pockets. We are blessed.

As we know more, we’ll share it. Unless we go to a movie or shopping or something, We’ve got a lots of free time.

July 16, 2012 | Tagged With: Alzheimers, Berry Henderson, Bill Becker, Bobby Smith, bone scan, brain MRI, chest x-ray, Country's Barbecue, CT scan, Dinglewood Pharmacy, Dr. Chris Wood, Dr. Dan George, Dr. Kwang, Dr. Lance Pagliaro, Duke University Hospital, El Tiempo Cantina, Fred Morgan, Houston TX, Jack Basset, Jill Tigner, John Kelly, Krystal, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Mays Clinic, Rick McKnight, Susan Morgan, Ted Short, Tex-Mex| Filed Under: kidney cancer | 25 Comments

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