Healing Progress

As of me writing this, I am 17 days out from surgery and I am healing very well. My parents left this past Tuesday to go back home and I have gotten back to living on my own and doing all my own cooking and laundry again 😦

All 10 or so inches of the incision on my arm are healing nicely and I’m able to live a pretty normal life, including driving, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc. My hand function is also coming back pretty well and other than some weakness from the multi-day nap it took, I’m feeling a lot better knowing that the motor nerves are at least all there. During the surgery, they had to remove a portion of the nerve that allows for the sensation on the inside of my forearm. It’s likely I’ll never get full sensation back in the forearm which is the least of my concerns, but I still don’t have any sensation on the back of my thumb which I’m praying is just a sleeping nerve still.

Right after the surgery, I was initially very surprised by how much I could move my arm and I was improving drastically day by day. My strength is starting to come back at a slower rate though and I think I’m getting out of the surgery recovery stage and into a period where I’m starting to discover what my limitations will be long term. I’m sure my strength will continue to improve, but as of right now, I’m somewhere between being able to comfortably curl a water bottle and a 5-lb dumbbell. My arm feels pretty normal but feels like I have a 30 lbs dumbbell strapped to it all the time which limits some of the finer movements and means that I have to sit down and elevate my arm after I’ve been out and about for about 4 hours or so.

I’m able to slightly awkwardly play my guitar now, and other than a raandom character getting throw in by my left hand ever now and then, I’m able to type two-handed. When I went into surgery, there was a possibility that I would wake up and not have the ability to bend my elbow for a few months until they could perform a muscle transplant surgery. Looking back on that now, I’m so grateful that they were able to save a portion of each of the muscles and for how much arm movement I have.

Next Steps

This is a weird time in my life in that I don’t know what the next 3-months of my life will look like. While the surgery was very successful and I’m optimistic about the future, I’m now having to shift my focus from the mass in my arm to the lesions in my lungs. The mass in my arm was definitely more serious than the lung nodules, but the lung nodules are likely going to be harder to treat (I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure you can’t just cut out my lungs like they did my bicep). I only have two scans of the lung nodules which were 6-weeks apart and didn’t show any growth. There is a hope that with the primary tumor in my arm is gone, the lung nodules will go away, or forever stay the same size and not grow. Please pray this would be the case. Unfortunately, with this type of cancer, I will likely need scans 6-months from now before I can really tell what the lung nodules are doing.

I’m not sure what the timeline will be, but I am going to have to go through a Med Board for the Air Force to see whether or not they will retain me or medically separate me. I can’t really believe that everything that I’ve been working towards might be over after just a few short months. The doctor said that the likely result of a Med Board would be separation, but if I wanted to stay in, we could really push for that and I would have a chance at being able to stay active duty and find a different job. I won’t have to make any decisions for several weeks, but I’m essentially having to rethink my life and re-decide what I really want to do. It will likely be some form of an engineering job that I continue doing, but where I do that from and who I do it for are decisions I’m going to have to make. I don’t know exactly what decisions I’ll have to make yet, but I know that I’ll be having to make some big ones soon, so please pray for wisdom as I think through things.

When I left my hometown in Florida, I always knew that it was home for me and that I wanted to go back, but I didn’t think I would potentially be going back so soon. I came to San Antonio planning to get treated and then get back out, but I’m really loving the church that I’m at and being in a bigger city. I feel torn between conflicting things while simultaneously having to determine which things are even still possible for me and my 1.5 biceps.

Between jobs and internships out of state and different housing arrangements in school, I’ve moved all my belongings to 10-different places in 5-states and have had 21-different roommates in the past 6-years. I’m pretty tired of having to walk into new places and meet new people knowing that I’ll have to leave eventually, but at the same time, I’ve seen how much the Lord has grown me with each of those different moves and the different people I’ve interacted with. A friend once told me that all the moves just reminds us that this life on earth is not our home and that we will never feel completely comfortable where we’re at until we get to our true home in eternity. That’s really stuck with me over the past few years. As it’s looking like this current phase of life is coming to a close and I’ll need to slow down for a while, I’m excited for it to an extent, but also sad to see it go.

Money

I was on the phone with a friend several weeks ago and was telling him that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my blog. After talking to him for a bit, I made my lose goals with the blog to 1) update people’s prayer requests and 2) share how I’m seeing the Lord work in new ways with the hope that other people can see God working, without having to personally get cancer like I did. In the spirit of the latter goal, I want to be pretty open with the money side of this so you can see how the Lord’s provided in that way.

After talking to other cancer patients, I’ve personally seen about 4-ways that finances become a major factor in serious medical diagnoses.

1. The actual treatment costs: scans, appointments, radiation, surgeries, drugs, etc.
2. Potentially living away from home to be closer to treatment.
3. Loss of income during treatment
4. Any needed lifestyle changes (i.e. diet changes, moving out of an environment that may have caused the illness, at-home medical equipment, etc).

As a fresh Lieutenant who was scraping by to pay for his life and master’s classes while working part-time, I didn’t have much savings to be able to handle these big expenses. After looking at all the treatment options, I knew I wanted to pursue some more holistic health-based options in addition to the conventional treatment (I explain some of this decision in my 24 August post). In my pride, I initially wanted to cover all the expenses myself and didn’t want to ask for help, so I pulled out a low interest $25k “Career Starter Loan” available to freshly commissioned officers. I used $12,500 of this to pay for the upfront cost required for the holistic health cancer program and the roughly $1,100/week in treatment I’m doing from the same place. This would allow me to pursue roughly 10-weeks of treatment multiple days a week for the cost of a car payment over the next 5-years.

Around the same time, I had a few different people contact me and ask if they could help pay for some of my treatment. After some convincing by my family, I eventually decided to start the GoFundMe with the hope that I would raise a couple thousand dollars to get me a few more weeks of treatment or maybe pay off the debt a little bit sooner. I was blown away by the amount of money I raised over just the few couple weeks and by the number of individual people that have donated. Thus far, I’ve raised $21,456 from 63 individual donors. (BTW, the total on GoFundMe is the sum of the money donated directly through GoFundMe as well as any donations that people have sent directly to me). I think I’m so deep into these medical expenses that I’m still struggling to appreciate just how much money $21k is, but what really continues to amaze me, is that 63 people know me or my family well enough to send me money.

Total for all the natural treatments, I’ve spent $19,654. Now I’m no expert, but by my math, that means that everyone donating has completely covered all my expenses thus far. A few months ago, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to even pursue these treatments because of the cost, but now I’m sitting here getting to see how the Lord has provided. Thank you to everyone who donated. My first thought was to look to some sort of big insurance company, government entity, or bank to make my money problems go away, but it has been so much more of a blessing to get to see the individual names of people sending me money, and I was amazed by just how effective a community of people can be. I’ll eat my way through the rest of the GoFundMe money in the next couple of weeks, but that $21k is not just $21k less of debt for me. More importantly, it’s the ability to spend an extra 5-months doing this treatment if needed. If it wasn’t for that money, I would be running out of my own loan at about this point.

I said this in a post a while back and I’ll say it again, if you’re unable to donate for whatever reason, I still appreciate you paying your taxes and contributing towards my government salary. I know natural treatments and paying out of pocket for “extra” medical treatment are pretty divisive topics, so I don’t want to at all imply that I’m only grateful for those that are donating. I know there are many people out there who are regularly taking time out of their day to pay for me rather than just paying a payment. I really appreciate that and I think the success of the surgery and the speed at which I’m healing are through those prayers.

Now all this talk about money has just covered the treatment costs. I’ll quickly hit on the other costs and the way the Lord’s provided.

1. Treatment Costs: I got the medical diagnosis right after coming on Active Duty which means I now have full health coverage. That is very clearly the Lord working through the timeline. Since BAMC is a military hospital, it doesn’t deal with Tricare or money for their military patients which makes everything so much easier. I also had a doctor spend 3-hours on the phone with Tricare on a Friday evening to make sure I was able to get my second opinions at MD Anderson. Since BAMC doesn’t do money, I’m not sure how much all of my treatment would have cost, but a quick AI estimate puts it at $60k-$80k for everything I’ve done thus far.
2. Moving to TX for treatment: The Air Force has covered all my expenses to be living in San Antonio for treatment and I haven’t had to pay a dime. I know this category of expenses is a hard one for a lot of people, so I’m so grateful and amazed that the Lord has provided through the Air Force in this way.
3. Loss of Income: I’m still a 2nd Lt and am making my normal pay despite not being able to work right now. I joke that I’m employed, just not gainfully employed. My job right now is just to get better. This has really allowed me to focus on taking care of myself and doing research.
4. Lifestyle changes: My senior year of college, I was living off of $35 a week for groceries (maybe that where I got cancer from…). I’ve adjusted my grocery budget to $150 a week to be able to buy organic healthier foods and have purchased some things like water filters and air filters to help my body be able to focus on healing the cancer rather than the toxins in my environment. This has come through some basic budget changes and I’m very grateful to have a salary job for the first time in my life to really be able to afford these things.

It’s been a roller coaster of emotions the past few months. When I look back to where I was in May to where I am now, it’s disappointing. Overall though, my perspective and what I value have changed so drastically that it’s not as depressing as I would have thought it would be. Please keep praying for my healing, the lung nodules to go away or stop growing, and for the decisions that I’ll have to make in the coming future. Thank you all for everything.