Cosmo254
New Member
- Location
- Northern California
I was born in northern California and lived here all my life until my husband, oldest daughter and I moved to Hawaii so he could work in his mother's floral shop in Waikiki. She wasn't too good at floral arrangements and my husband was as he had been doing it for several years. To say the least, working with his mother didn't work out and we came back to California with two daughters, our youngest was born in Honolulu in 1968.
I worked for a communications corporation and retired in 1997 then began working for the Osteoporosis foundation when I found a lump in my breast and learned it was cancer. I had a lumpectomy, chemo and radiation was out of work for one year due to my blood pressure going crazy with the chemo and radiation therapy. After my one year relaxation I went back to the same communications corporation that I had previously retired from and worked in San Francisco and retired a second time in 2006.
We were living in a two bedroom plus bonus room townhouse in a suburb of San Francisco called Hercules for 27 years but started having problems going up the two flights of stairs to reach the bedrooms and bathrooms on the second floor so in 2006 we decided to put the townhouse up for sale and move north. But it didn't work out as we planned as my husband had his first attack of pancreatitis and was hospitalized two weeks and when he came home wanted to hold off on selling the house until he felt stronger. Well needless to say the market crashed and we couldn't sell the house.
So we waited and in January 2011 my husband came down with a horrible cough that wouldn't go away. Once he started having pains in his side and back I made him see his doctor and so many tests were done in the next two weeks I couldn't keep up with what went on. The outcome though was stage IV lung cancer.
My husband had gone from 157 pounds to 112 pounds and could barely walk. We had a Regional Cancer Center near us and we went and spoke with the oncologist there who told my husband they couldn't cure him but could prolong his life and make him as comfortable as possible. When we came home I checked the stats for stage IV lung cancer on the internet and saw that half the people with stage IV lived 8 months, 10% lived one year, and 1% made it to 5 years. I made arrangements for his funeral without telling him. I figured I would be too upset and emotional when the time came to worry about a funeral.
Funny things happen when you fight hard, pray hard, and do everything possible to make things work. He went into remission after the first 7 weeks of radiation and chemo and felt pretty good in 2012. His oncologist put him on Avastin as a maintenance drug but then he had a mini stroke and they had to take him off it, as it was known to cause strokes. His cancer came back and they sent him to have modular radiation treatments. Each of these treatments where the equivalent of 5 regular radiation treatments and he only had 5 treatments. Again the tumors shrank somewhat.
He was no longer able to go upstairs to his bedroom and I made him comfortable on the couch and bought a baby monitor so is he needed anything during the night I would hear him. We finally decided we had to sell the house, the prices had come up and I wanted to be closer to family, which was my oldest daughter, son-in-law and 3 of her 5 children. We moved in with her before we sold the house as we thought it looked better without anything inside not realizing it would take 7 months to sell.
But something wonderful came out of our moving further north. We had to find new doctors and the oncologist I found for my husband was excellent. He asked if my husband had been asked about his DNA from the pathologist tests before they started giving him treatment to see if he could take one of the specialty drugs for lung cancer and we said it was never mentioned to him. This doctor found that my husband did have the gene needed for Tarceva, a pill that he would take only once a day and if there were no horrible side effects and if it worked he could remain on it all his life. The pill supply costs $6000. per a 30 day supply but with our health benefits and a little help from the company that produces the magic pill we got it for free.
He has been taking it for 4 months now and this month was the first time in 4 years that his hemoglobin was in the normal range, cancer lives on red blood cells to make it grow, so if his hemoglobin was going up it had to mean the cancer wasn't progressing. He also gained weight and now is at 155 pounds.
We won't know for sure what is going on in his body until he gets another PET scan next month but I'm a believer in miracles and I believe this pill and with the prayers of all our friends and relatives is the miracle we hoped for.
This is just a brief explanation as to why I am living with my husband and one fat Chihuahua in a rented house far north of where I grew up and brought up my family in the San Francisco Bay Area, and quite frankly I love it here.
I worked for a communications corporation and retired in 1997 then began working for the Osteoporosis foundation when I found a lump in my breast and learned it was cancer. I had a lumpectomy, chemo and radiation was out of work for one year due to my blood pressure going crazy with the chemo and radiation therapy. After my one year relaxation I went back to the same communications corporation that I had previously retired from and worked in San Francisco and retired a second time in 2006.
We were living in a two bedroom plus bonus room townhouse in a suburb of San Francisco called Hercules for 27 years but started having problems going up the two flights of stairs to reach the bedrooms and bathrooms on the second floor so in 2006 we decided to put the townhouse up for sale and move north. But it didn't work out as we planned as my husband had his first attack of pancreatitis and was hospitalized two weeks and when he came home wanted to hold off on selling the house until he felt stronger. Well needless to say the market crashed and we couldn't sell the house.
So we waited and in January 2011 my husband came down with a horrible cough that wouldn't go away. Once he started having pains in his side and back I made him see his doctor and so many tests were done in the next two weeks I couldn't keep up with what went on. The outcome though was stage IV lung cancer.
My husband had gone from 157 pounds to 112 pounds and could barely walk. We had a Regional Cancer Center near us and we went and spoke with the oncologist there who told my husband they couldn't cure him but could prolong his life and make him as comfortable as possible. When we came home I checked the stats for stage IV lung cancer on the internet and saw that half the people with stage IV lived 8 months, 10% lived one year, and 1% made it to 5 years. I made arrangements for his funeral without telling him. I figured I would be too upset and emotional when the time came to worry about a funeral.
Funny things happen when you fight hard, pray hard, and do everything possible to make things work. He went into remission after the first 7 weeks of radiation and chemo and felt pretty good in 2012. His oncologist put him on Avastin as a maintenance drug but then he had a mini stroke and they had to take him off it, as it was known to cause strokes. His cancer came back and they sent him to have modular radiation treatments. Each of these treatments where the equivalent of 5 regular radiation treatments and he only had 5 treatments. Again the tumors shrank somewhat.
He was no longer able to go upstairs to his bedroom and I made him comfortable on the couch and bought a baby monitor so is he needed anything during the night I would hear him. We finally decided we had to sell the house, the prices had come up and I wanted to be closer to family, which was my oldest daughter, son-in-law and 3 of her 5 children. We moved in with her before we sold the house as we thought it looked better without anything inside not realizing it would take 7 months to sell.
But something wonderful came out of our moving further north. We had to find new doctors and the oncologist I found for my husband was excellent. He asked if my husband had been asked about his DNA from the pathologist tests before they started giving him treatment to see if he could take one of the specialty drugs for lung cancer and we said it was never mentioned to him. This doctor found that my husband did have the gene needed for Tarceva, a pill that he would take only once a day and if there were no horrible side effects and if it worked he could remain on it all his life. The pill supply costs $6000. per a 30 day supply but with our health benefits and a little help from the company that produces the magic pill we got it for free.
He has been taking it for 4 months now and this month was the first time in 4 years that his hemoglobin was in the normal range, cancer lives on red blood cells to make it grow, so if his hemoglobin was going up it had to mean the cancer wasn't progressing. He also gained weight and now is at 155 pounds.
We won't know for sure what is going on in his body until he gets another PET scan next month but I'm a believer in miracles and I believe this pill and with the prayers of all our friends and relatives is the miracle we hoped for.
This is just a brief explanation as to why I am living with my husband and one fat Chihuahua in a rented house far north of where I grew up and brought up my family in the San Francisco Bay Area, and quite frankly I love it here.
