I have arrived!

I arrived today in Hyderabad India.  Although the travel time was only 30 hours or so, the journey to Hyderabad actually started last summer. Last year,  during the first week of June,  my family received two huge set backs. First my mother-in-law passed away and then the very same week I was diagnosed with melanoma skin cancer. My mother-in-law had been sick for a number of years so her passing was somewhat expected. Obviously my diagnosis was not.

I had noticed a soft bump on my head when I was giving myself a haircut in April. In May it had grown in height enough that my hair trimmer clipped it. Being that it was growing so quickly I went to the dermatologist to have it checked out. The biopsy came back in June as positive for malignant melanoma.To say I was shocked is an understatement. Reeling is probably a better way to describe how I felt. I have never experienced anything like the emotions that came up after that diagnosis. Quite frankly I saw the diagnosis as a death sentence and I was very angry about it. I could not understand why this was happening, I was in a really dark place and I am sure I made life miserable for Susan and the kids. At one point in June, Susan had had enough and suggested I make an appointment with a Reiki healer that she knows. Although it took a few appointments over the summer, the energy work I did with Michael Fitzgerald did allow me to release that anger/fear and get myself back on track.

Soon after the diagnosis I had an appointment with a surgical oncologist and was on his schedule for surgery later that month. So in June the surgeon excised the lesion and performed a biopsy on the sentinel lymph nodes. Of the four nodes they took out, one turned out to be microscopically positive for melanoma.

At this point I had a decision to make. I could either take a wait and see attitude and have the oncologist monitor the lymph nodes in my neck for changes or have all of the lymph nodes in that region of the neck removed and biopsied. I chose the more aggressive approach and scheduled a surgery for the later half of July that would do what they called a level 5( this refers to a particular area) neck dissection. Susan and I sent the kids off to camp in mid-July and soon after I had the neck dissection. That surgery actually went quite easily.

2/12/2011

In August I was on my way to recovering from the surgery in July and had had an appointment with the medical oncologist to talk about interferon treatment. Interferon makes your body think it has the flu and causes the body to boost its immune system. The idea is that the immune system would then knock off any stray melanoma cells that might be roaming around in the blood.

Then, in about the second week of August I noticed that I had another bump on my head that was right next to the incision left by the first surgery. It had that same squishy feel as the first lesion which had me very concerned. I called my surgeon the very next day and he was able to get me in that day….perhaps he heard the panic in my voice??? Well, they extracted the bump and took another biopsy which came back again, as melanoma. It appeared that melanoma cells had been trapped in the lymph channels and with the channel system disrupted and all of the lymph nodes in my neck taken out….they had no where to go so they started popping out on my head. This meant a third surgery was needed to excise more skin on my head around the metastasis. I scheduled the surgery for August 23rd and was just starting to settle down from the new diagnosis when more of the pumps started popping up. Ultimately I ended up with 5 more of the things and they were growing quickly.  At this point I was a little frantic and of course my surgeon was out of town….so I  that plastic surgeon that assisted during June who was nice enough to extract the bumps and have them biopsied. Turns out that all of these new bumps were sub-dermal and considered in-transit metastasis.  This took my cancer staging all the way down to 3c, the last stop before stage 4.

While all of this was going on I felt like I needed something I could do on a daily basis that would help me relax. My thoughts were going around in circles and I was finding it hard to sleep at night. Susan had been to Fairfield Iowa a couple of times at this point and she was meditating frequently, I started thinking back to my college days when I took a Zen Philosophy class and how I really enjoyed the Zen Meditation we were doing as part of that class. I found a Japanese Zen Temple in the city and I attended a couple of meditation services. That didn’t really click for me so I purchased some cushions and starting sitting at home in the mornings. I kept looking for another temple but instead found Carl Jerome and the North Shore Meditation and Dharma center.  I sit with Carl a couple of times a week in the early morning and he has been giving me a good list of books and articles to read to move my practice forward, but more on that later. I found the meditation to be really helpful as I could feel the calming effects throughout the day.

I had the surgery and thankfully they finally excised all of the cancer cells from my head. After I healed I started the interferon treatments. The standard interferon treatment is a one month induction phase where a visit to the hospital is required five days a week. Then eleven months of a reduced dose which is self administered via an injection. Each day during the induction phase I received an infusion of the interferon as well as plenty of saline. The whole process process took about 1.5 hours and I could feel the affects of the medication almost immediately. As I mentioned before, the interferon causes your body to put its immune system into overdrive. The only problem is that in the process I constantly felt like I had a serious case of the flu. Deep chills, high fever, foggy brain, fatigue…..all of it.  I made it through induction phase but had to rest for one week in the middle due to high levels of liver enzymes. After that I started the low dose phase and gave myself injections 3 times a week. The fever and chills were most prevalent in the induction phase but the fatigue seemed to build through the induction phase and just kept on rising during the self-admin. After two months of feeling like I was climbing Mt. Everest without an oxygen tank I started noticing that I had a blurry spot in the lower part of my vision through the right eye. I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist and he found that I had interferon related retinopathy. In short the interferon was killing cells on my retina. This is a known but relatively rare side effect of the interferon and given that I was experiencing it after only two months it was recommended that I stop the treatment.

Stop taking a drug that is making you feel horrible, sounds like an easy decision. In actuality I was torn. I had put so much hope in the fact that the interferon was going to stop the recurrence of the cancer that it actually was a hard decision. My oncologist said that the risk/reward balance of the treatment had shifted and that it was really too high of risk to continue. My last dose of the interferon was the Monday before Thanksgiving.

So now what. I had a type of cancer that has a high rate of recurrence and I could not take the only treatment considered by the oncologist to reduce that rate. I needed another plan and I needed to put it in action quickly. That is when I started seriously considering Ayurveda.