The Plan

Last night I was scheduled to give a presentation at IUSB on the quality of mental health care in St. Joseph County. Instead, I was having a radiation mask made. Now that, my lovely students, is what you call an attention getter!

I have a ton of new information to share with you all. Yesterday, the lovely, amazing Candice Clarke called and pulled some strings to get me into Dr. Hostetter at the Center for Cancer Care in Goshen. Not only did she make all these contacts on my behalf, she also left school and stayed with us the entire day. Foutz, this woman deserves an entire box of Kudo's.

Although Candice knows Dr. Hostetter through her battle with breast cancer, when we arrived we learned that he actually specializes in head and neck cancers. Dr. Hostetter explained that ACC (Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma) is a type of cancer that is staged according to whether or not it is surgically treatable. Since mine is not, he does agree that it is stage 4. He believes the best course of action is to use radiation therapy. Radiation uses beams of high energy waves or particles (Kids, let's all get out our element charts) to kill cells or keep them from growing or dividing. Of course, radiation also kills good cells in your body, but unlike the cancer cells, they tend to recover. They suggested using IMRT radiation which uses a computer to more precisely deliver the beam so that they can specifically target just the bad cells and save as many of the good cells as possible.

I then met with Dr. Wheeler. He is the radiologist. I felt an incredible sense of peace about him. He told me that, although this is a tough tumor, he has battled this guy head on lots of times. He explained that ACC has a tendency to spread to the lungs, liver, or bones. So, he set up an appointment for a PET Scan on Monday. The PET Scan will basically give us a color-coded guide of cells in my body and will show us where there are any signs of cancer. For those of you who are praying, put this high on your list. Our hope and prayer is that the cancer has not spread to any other systems in my body. They want to start radiation right away and even made my mask (this keeps my head and neck very still as they aim the radiation at the tumor).

The doctors suggested that I do go to Chicago to get a second opinion; however, they truly believe that Dr. Panje at Rush Memorial will follow the same protocol to treat the cancer. They are willing to work together if Dr. Panje and the doctors at Rush can offer any alternatives, but the big decision I need to make now is where I will do my radiation. There is a big debate about whether or not this type of tumor responds better to photo or neutron radiation. I don't really know which is better and don't even have the mental energy to research this at this point (hey....anybody want to make this their personal mission and get back to me?). I'm not really sure what I will do if Goshen says they want to use photon and Chicago says Neutron, but since I will be going in for treatment everyday (M-F) for 6 weeks, I truly believe the best thing for me to do is to go to Goshen so that I can be surrounded by my family and friends during this time.