Buongiorno in nuovo giorno

January 1, 2013
If you asked me a year ago if I would be here right now, I don't know if I could give you a firm answer. A year ago I had just finished my first treatment for StageIV melanoma. Everything was so new a year ago, the word to describe that time was UPHEAVAL. This January I guess the word to describe the days of late is ENDURANCE. Last year, yesterday, was so long. The longest year of my life. My most painful year. My saddest year. My angriest year. My scared year. My strongest year.

I started this silly blog in the summer of 2011. My husband had just deployed and I decided to take those six months of his deployment and train for a 5k, which was almost a joke because Angi doesn't run! I dream of running but I don't have the discipline for running BUT I was willing to try, especially with the incentive of having a gorgeous toned body for my husband to come home to :)

Quickly this blog changed direction as the summer of 2011 turned into the summer of health issues and when my life forever was altered - or better yet, the train tracks I had guided my caboose on for 37 years were suddenly ripped out of the ground, my train flew off the tracks, and my train came to a screeching halt. Since then I've crawled, walked, jogged, hitchhiked, been carried, and even piggybacked on my husband.

Right after my husband left for his deployment it just seemed I got sick and couldn't get better. First I spent a month with strep throat twice. Then I got shingles right before my 37th birthday! Then I got a golfball-sized lump on the left side of my throat. Right away my mind went to melanoma. The year before, in July of 2010, I had my second melanoma removed from above my right temple. Because of its size, lymph nodes below my jawline were removed as well. When I felt this lump on the left side of my throat, right away I worried that it was melanoma in my lymph node.

The nurse I saw didn't help - who tells a patient "I don't know what it is but of masses I've seen THAT big haven't been good"?? Thankfully I was able to get squeezed into an ultrasound that day! A month passed that started with me being told I had a good old fashioned goiter that 50% of the population has and then a biopsy turned the doctors' opinions on a dime and told me I had Hurthle Cell Thyroid cancer. Come again?

There are certain events in your life that always remain frozen in your mind, you are not even voluntarily forget when you were at that moment, like 9-11, everyone knows where they were and will never forget. If you are ever diagnosed with cancer, that's one of those moments. I know what I was doing and where I was with every diagnosis. With this particular cancer diagnosis, I was at Pymatuning Lake in Ohio. It was August 17, right about noon. It was C's 13th birthday. We had spent the girls' birthday week in Ohio as well as attend my cousin's son's wedding, it was to be a week of celebration. C had heard of the insane population of catfish at Pymatuning Lake where the fish literally could walk on each other for food.  She had wanted her grandfather to take her there. We were just wrapping up contributing to the obesity of the Pymatuning catfish and were just getting into our van when my phone rang.

Caller ID kept me from being surprised and I knew the biopsy was due back any day. The nurse asked me if I could come in that day, after explaining we were in Ohio not in New York, I was put on hold and I was greeted on the phone with the endocrinologist. Words just hung in the summer heat as I blasted the air conditioning in the van. I paced around the van, hearing the words and then saw them float in the air before me. Cancer. Hurthle Cell. Aggressive more type of thyroid cancer. Large mass. Surgery soon. Iodine radiation treatment. Isolation. Happy 13th birthday C, lets have a cheery drive home discussing those crazy catfish....

And that's what I tried to do. I tried to make the phone call looked like it didn't really bother me, I did tell my dad and the girls of the diagnosis, my girls have dealt with melanoma twice so the C word is not as scary in our house like other houses. I tried to brush off the news, compared it to the melanoma  surgery I had the year before and did my best to bury the panic that was starting to set in as I drove back to my father's house to get ready for C's birthday dinner - I didn't have room or time to deal with the news at that time. I never needed my husband as much as I needed him at that moment but he was deployed, I was on my own, thankfully in God's Hand but I still felt alone without Joe. Being without him complicated the surgery the doctor said I needed very soon because of the particular cancer's aggressiveness. Not only did I need to have surgery but an entire week of isolation after iodine radiation to ensure any pieces of thyroid left beind were killed. The isolation is needed so that the radiation doesn't damage the thyroid gland to anyone who gets too close to the person being treatment. How was I to have surgery and then spend a week in isolation with my husband deployed? Questions kept rising up in my throat.

On the drive home to Long Island, along Route80 that stretches across Pennsylvania, it was past midnight and pitch black outside and my girls had fallen asleep. I had the local Christian radio station and it seemed like every song pertained to my trial and before long I was cruising on Route80, sobbing, pleading, and praying. I pleaded with God to take the cancer away. It was more scary to me than the other cancers I had because the treatment plan sounded so overwhelming and I had no idea how I would do a week of isolation. I worried about being told it was a more aggressive form of thyroid cancer. I worried as to what that meant. I just kept crying and praying, and my girls kept sleeping. Then, in the pitch black, on the quiet Route80, I suddenly felt this comforting 'heaviness' blanket me. Once I felt 'wrapped in' this blanket, I heard God spoke to me.

I can't remember what God spoke like, I can't tell you it sounded like Darth Vader's father or Morgan Freeman from Evan Almighty but I remember what His voice felt like. It was surety, safety, confidence, security, familiar. He told me that 'the thyroid cancer was nothing. But that something bigger was coming" but He promised to "walk through it with us". I was awestruck that I was having this conversation with God - and yet here I was still driving, probably 80mph, as I'm having a conversation with our Lord! It wasn't the words that affected me as much as the feeling the words gave me. I didn't panic from the news. I felt like I was just to confirm the information I was being given. I remember feeling like I was being briefed on an upcoming military mission and I had no personal emotion connection to the information. I didn't even feel joyful over hearing that the thyroid cancer would be 'nothing', it was more of a fact I was absorbing. It was more of a feeling of sadness acceptance of 'something bigger' that was coming.

The next day I skyped with my husband and shared the night before's event. He and I both prayed and asked for guidance and asked to be told of what was coming. It took less than two weeks for us to find out.

My husband's deployed commander was extremely gracious and the base had Joe on a flight home within two weeks and he was able to come home for a week for my surgery and week of isolation. Before his return, my time was filled with trips into NYC (by myself!) to my hospital for blood work and other pre-surgical appointments like a standard chest x-ray. The chest x-ray was the last test I needed done before seeing my surgeon to discuss the surgery that I was to have in two days. The week was getting busy with my husband coming home the next day and then trying to finish up last minute things around the house before surgery. I wanted to quickly see my surgeon, go over the surgery, and then book it out of the city before the rush hour traffic would turn my one hour trip to three or four hours.

My surgeon came in and I could tell something was wrong. He started out his conversation about a mass in my lung and that I needed a biopsy to determine what it was. I thought my surgeon must have had a long day because he must have me confused with another patient - I was there to discuss thyroid surgery, not something in my lung. I was about to politely remind him why I was there when he said I needed the lung biopsy as soon as I healed from the thyroid surgery. I was confused and kept wondering why he felt so urgent for me to see the pulmonary oncologist doctor on the business card he was trying to push into my hand.

The thyroid surgery went amazingly easy, less than an hour and the biopsy was misdiagnosed. Instead of Hurthle Cell cancer, the huge mass was benign Hurthle cells with two very small micro-cancers of papillary cancer - the most 'passive' type of thyroid cancer. After the surgery, my surgeon told me that the normal protocol of such small papillary thyroid cancer is not even removal, just watching. But because the biopsy had come back with the result of an aggressive cancer, surgery was considered necessary. If it wasn't for the erred biopsy, the surgery would not have been scheduled, the chest x-ray would not have been preformed, the mass in my lung wouldn't have been found. Funny how things happen like that.

I healed quickly from the thyroid cancer surgery, in fact within a few days you could hardly see the scar. Joe returned to his deployed location and life went back to 'normal' as we waited for Joe to return for good from his deployment in November. In the meantime I met with the pulmonary oncologist, scheduled a biopsy, and tried to not be anxious about what was sitting in my left lung. The lung doctor didn't believe it was thyroid or melanoma, or even lung cancer. He said the mass was 'too perfect, too round', most probably a benign growth that he felt would not even operated on. H was so confident that it was just a benign mass that he scheduled a lung biopsy for once Joe returned from his deployment, in a month and a half.

This time it was November 17th, 2011. I was in the van, Joe was halfway through the turn into my hospital's parking garage when I received the phone call telling me I had cancer. The lung cancer's nurse wanted to give us a heads up prior to the office appointment we had in about an hour. Melanoma in my lung. StageIV. She said she was sorry. I thanked her for the call. Numb. That's all I felt. She had talked to me the week before. She and I discussed that IF it was cancer, we would want it to be lung cancer and not melanoma because if it was 'just' lung cancer, it was localized in just the lung so the treatment would just be removing a portion of my lung but if it was melanoma, that meant the cancer was in my blood stream and in addition to surgery, some sort of chemotherapy was required. So we rooted for lung cancer. Instead I had melanoma. In my lung. They were able to compare the biopsied cells to the melanoma I had removed on my right temple in July of 2010 and they matched. Despite quickly having surgery to remove the suspicious mole (it appeared on my temple in January of 2010, I went to my dermatologist right away, had several consults because of where it was and had it removed by July), despite having the Sentinel Node Biopsy and having several lymph nodes removed, despite those lymph nodes removed were clear of cancer, at least ONE melanoma cell escaped. Damn it! I had melanoma in my lung!

Before the end of the week I would discover I had a 3cm mass in my left lung and 13 small bb-size tumors scattered in my brain. I felt none of these foreign invaders, I still don't feel those. I feel others but none of the original ones. The ones in my brain could have kept growing without me knowing - I have migraines, I would have thought any pain or visual changes were just associated to my migraines. I didn't have a cough, wheeze or phlegm from the tumor in my lung, I still don't. It was only because of the thyroid cancer chest x-ray that the melanoma was revealed. Because of that, I always thank God for the thyroid cancer and find it to be a blessing.

So this is how I wound up on this path. So that's why this fat girl is running right now. I started running the second I was told of the StageIV melanoma and I haven't stopped yet. What else am I to do? Stop and give up? A friend recently told me that she feels I am so brave and I replied that I am definitely not brave but if you were to fall into a pit of vipers, what can you do but try to get out? You would fight off the snakes and try to climb out. What else can you do? Bend into a ball and cry? Who does that?? How does that help things? If I'm going out, IF SOMETHING'S TAKING ME OUT, I'm going out fighting! So that's why I run. Because I have to. Joe and I have been running this journey over a year. Its been challenging, scary, painful, sad, frustrating, but we haven't quit. We hold hands, grit our teeth, and keep throwing a foot in front of the other. A new year and we continue to run.