Musings by OZ

Ginny and I have been in Warsaw Poland for a few months but it has not been as smooth sailing as we would have hoped, there have been a couple of bumps in the road or in keeping with the sailing analogy, a few choppy waves with the possibility of sea sickness ahead…..

Christmas 2015 I was diagnosed with stage 4 Lymphoma. What I have is sub-type of lymphoma called CLL or Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and as of now it is not curable. My whole body was affected by the cancer, it was in all of my internal organs as well as my bone marrow. After a couple of surgeries and 6 months of Chemo Therapy I was informed that I beat the odds and was in remission. My doctor told me that less than 25% of his patients had recovered so fully and so quickly from the type and stage of cancer that I had.

 

Six months after that I was diagnosed with stage 3 Thyroid Cancer, apparently I had this cancer concurrently with the lymphoma and it just went unnoticed until I had a follow up scan for the Lymphoma. The cancerous tumor surrounded the thyroid so they performed a complete thyroidectomy and removed the thyroid. They also removed my parathyroid glands, I didn’t even know I had such a thing until I was diagnosed with cancer. They removed both of my parathyroid glands but were able to save one of them, it was chopped up and seeded into my neck muscle, the theory is that in a year or so it will begin to produce the hormone that it produced previously and should help with my long term recovery. Shortly after this surgery I was quarantined in a hospital room to receive radiated iodine treatment. After surgery and radiation treatment I was told that I was cured from the Thyroid Cancer.

I have been in remission and cancer free for over a year.

After dealing with Cancer for a couple of years it was time to head to Warsaw Poland to stay for a number of months and take care of some business.  The night before we left for Poland I discovered a lump in my armpit, the same area that I had a golf ball sized swollen lymph node that helped with the initial diagnosis of lymphoma. I chose not to tell Ginny about the lump so as not to worry her before the journey to Poland but I did email my doctor and ask for his advice. I didn’t hear back from the doctor until we arrived in Poland. On the second day of our adventure in Poland I received an email from my US doctor, he suggested that I get a CT scan as soon as possible because my cancer may have returned.

My business partner lives in Warsaw and had arranged for us to stay in an apartment that he owns, it had just been vacated by the previous tenant and was available for us to use for as long as we like. The morning after we arrived in Warsaw I had a conversation with my partner and explained the situation with the unwanted lump. After a brief talk he made a phone call and arranged an appointment within an hour with his doctor. At that appointment I had an ultra sound performed as well as blood work and I scheduled a CT scan for the next day.

The next day before we visited the doctor for the CT scan we did some shopping for stuff for the apartment, it was a fully furnished apartment and it came with a few pots and pans but nothing else, shopping was also a nice distraction.

Somehow during the shopping I lost my cell phone, I needed that phone to communicate with people in the US as well as Poland and I was pretty bummed that I had lost it. When we got back to the apartment I did another search for the phone, as I was searching Ginny mentioned that someone in Poland was trying to friend her on face book, she didn’t recognize the person so she looked a little closer. It turned out that someone had found the phone and was attempting to return it to us.

The story is that a police officer found the phone in a parking lot and was going to take it to the station to turn it in but the officer’s son knew that it would probably never find its way back home, so he took it upon himself to find the owner. When Ginny attempted to call my phone her name showed up on the screen and the guys wife was able to track her down on facebook. Once the contact was made we established that they had my phone and that we could pick it up that night if we wanted. They lived about 20 min. away but the problem was that we did not have Polish cell service yet so we had to use the wifi at the apartment to upload directions to the guys apartment, once we left the apartment the map app. would show us how to get there but it wouldn’t be able to re-rout if we made a wrong turn, we decided to go for it. We jumped in the car for the first time and of course the fuel gauge was on empty, with only 20 km left in the tank we had to detour from the google directions to find gas, we were able to do this and with Ginny as my trusty navigator we got back on track. After making many wrong turns we finally tracked down the address and were able to find the guy with my phone, we met him and his dog on a dark Warsaw corner at about 10 pm. Once we had the phone back we remembered that we had no directions back to our apartment Thankfully the guy allowed us to use his wifi hotspot on his phone so we were able to find our way back to our place. After the day that we had, being able to successfully navigate the streets of Warsaw at night in the rain, find a gas station and retrieve my phone gave us a great sense of accomplishment and made for a good distraction.

The next morning I received my CT scan. We met with the doctor and reviewed all of the test results, my partner reviewed and translated all of the results so they could be mailed to my Oncologist in the US. My Oncologist as well as the doctor in Warsaw both agreed that the results showed the possibility of the return of the cancer but they could also be explained by a simple viral infection and that we should monitor my health in the coming months before a prognosis is made.

A couple of months after seeing the doctor in Warsaw I returned for a followup visit, an ultra sound showed that the lump under my left arm had grown and that I now had an even larger node cluster under my right arm. The doctor let me know that in his opinion I had a 80 to 90% chance that my cancer was back, correction, the cancer, its not just my cancer, so many people suffer from this disease that to call it my cancer is selfish. Anyway he suggested that I require surgery to have a node removed so it could be biopsied to find out if the cancer had indeed returned and that he had gone as far as he could, the surgery was too invasive for him and required a hospital visit.

That afternoon we drove directly to Medicover Szpital.