I’m pretty squeamish. I’ve mentioned this before. To give you an idea of how squeamish I am, while I tell people that I have watched all of Game of Thrones, the reality is that I “watched” a lot of it with my eyes squished shut and my hands or a blanket covering my face… you know… for protection…

Even just the concept of staples creeps me out. So a surgery with a distinct “ick” factor combined with having my head held together with staples after the fact did not really help to mitigate my inherent squeamishness.

Needless to say, in order to get through this period, I resorted to the full on Ostrich System… completely ignoring reality as if it didn’t even exist. And this worked! I survived the two plus weeks, and yesterday was the day that all of these creepy implements were removed… (I always knew the number was greater than 1…turns out the magic number was 30!)

By the way, for the staple removal, the hospital literally sent me home with a medical grade staple remover and said “Go see your family doctor”… and mine is on holidays!… but I am lucky to have a dear friend from my MBA class who is a nurse, and who graciously made a house call yesterday morning to help me out with this… so I am now footloose and staple-free! (Well, at least staple-free… footloose will come later… after three more weeks of bedrest…)

The next phase of my treatment plan has begun. A few days ago I met with my new Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Jonathan Wan from Credit Valley Hospital (The Carlo Fidani Cancer Centre). Since Dr. Wan is new to my treatment team, it is very important to me that he keeps Dr. Bedard, my oncologist from Princess Margaret, in the loop with the treatment plan. As it turns out, Dr. Wan is totally onboard with this, and actually already knows Dr. Bedard both professionally and personally, so I’m quite pleased with how the treatment team is coming together.

I know this is going to sound odd, but I had a great appointment with Dr. Wan. I liked his personality right from the outset. He is super energetic, exudes a ton of positive energy, is the exact same age as me and is an avid runner to boot… 🙂

But… (there’s always a “but”, right?!)… Dr. Wan did share some new information, that well, quite frankly, could have better. Like keeping score in golf, when counting tumours, the goal is ALWAYS a lower number. It turns out that my post-surgical MRI identified that a couple of pesky tumours were hiding behind the big fucker that was removed during the operation. So my grand tally of tumours to be dealt with is sitting at one down, four to go.

However this news didn’t, and hasn’t, dampened my spirit for this battle. This doesn’t change the treatment plan. And despite this turn of events, I was still so stoked during my chat with Dr. Wan that I may have behaved in a slightly inappropriate and over-zealous fashion…

The doc had pulled up a chair directly in front of me, just about a foot away… and I may have gotten a little enthusiastic as I was explaining to him that despite the number now being four, we are still going to win… and I may have grabbed his knee and slapped his thigh as I welcomed him to my “army”… Hopefully he doesn’t report me for patient misconduct!

A few of you may recall an old TV show of this name… truth be told, I never watched it. I’m really squeamish and absolutely abhor horror flicks and the like (more on this later!). But as I was being wheeled down to the surgery, some similarities crossed my mind: an OR located in the basement of a hospital, some funny characters milling about, and the fact that my life was kind of a horror show at that moment! How was I going to survive this?

Well the answer is twofold:

• Be an ostrich
• Find the humour!

My surgery was scheduled for Tuesday, December 13, and the neurosurgeon came by my room for a chat the night before. He reiterated that we were scheduled for noon on Tuesday, and he mentioned again that the surgery was not an easy one – that it was in fact quite complicated. He then asked how much detail I was interested in. So I laid out my game plan:

• You’re going to put me to sleep
• While I’m asleep, you are going to do your thing
• Then I’m going to wake up, and I’ll do my thing; I don’t need to know anything more than that

He agreed, so we had a plan…(this is killing Chris S that there’s not a spreadsheet involved here… but sometimes you just gotta keep it simple…)

Fast forward to Tuesday morning…as I enter The Crypt!

As you can imagine, there are a number of people involved in this type of procedure. Early on I met Andrew, who was tasked with prepping me for the anesthesiologist. In order to do this, Andrew had to get me and my bed into a different position. Except he was having some trouble with this part. He fussed around my bed for a few minutes to no avail. He then enlisted the help of another team member, Calvin, for some assistance. The next three minutes are punctuated with “I think it’s locked”, “How do we unlock it?”, “There’s gotta be a combination of buttons…?”…

Well I just couldn’t let this opportunity go by… it was absolutely absurd! I finally just had to chime in.

“Guys… I gotta say, you really aren’t instilling a lot of confidence over here…”

They stop, they look at each other, they don’t say anything… so I carry on…

“Well, you can’t operate my Bed but in 20 minutes you’re going to be operating on my Head!”

Their faces were priceless! I was shaking with laughter, they were in shock and then realized it was all okay, and then I got to give them the good news: “By the way, this is going in my blog. You guys are going to be famous.”

So here you go Andrew and Calvin… your 15 seconds of fame!

These are words I really never wanted to say, but well here I am… going for Round 2. Let’s just say this month really didn’t go as planned!

To catch you up from my last post (November 2018) life’s been pretty good… I’ve travelled overseas to visit family, I’ve completed incredible half-marathons at Mount Rushmore and in the Colorado Rockies… I enrolled in an MBA program… I turned the Big 5-0 this year and somewhere along the way… my hair grew back!

So how did I get here?

I first started experiencing some unusual headaches in August. In early September I reached out to both Urgent Care at the Cleveland Clinic as well as my family doctor about this. Cleveland Clinic suggested a referral to a neurologist and my family doctor sent me for an x-ray of my neck. Both suggested physio and massage. Throughout October, the sharp, sudden onset headaches became more frequent and longer in duration. I booked another appointment with my family doctor.

In early November, some of the sudden headaches morphed into what I was calling an “episode”: my hearing was being impacted (sounded like I was in a fish bowl!), the head pain would start, and then I would start to feel dizzy and off-balance. While the headaches were daily, the episodes were more infrequent, but were occurring more than once a week; I reported this to my family doctor at an appointment in early November. By the first weekend of December, the “episodes” began to manifest multiple times a day. I booked another appointment with my family doctor, but I also spoke immediately with the original Nurse Practitioner from Urgent Care. It was this NP at the Cleveland Clinic who suggested I go to Emergency, in order get a scan, in order to expedite a neurology appointment. Thank God I followed her advice.

I went to the ER in Oakville, had a CT scan and basically fast-tracked right past a neurology appointment straight to neurosurgery! The CT scan revealed three tumours in my brain – a large one (4 cm in diameter) at the back of my brain, plus two smaller ones on the side. The ER followed up with an MRI and then transferred me that day to Trillium under the care of a neurosurgeon and his team to get ready for the operation. So in a nutshell, I went to ER on Dec 7th for a CT scan, and six days later had brain surgery. Never even went back home.

Up to the Minute: Well the length of this post kinda got away from me… but there are a lot of people who have been asking me questions so I wanted to fill in some blanks…and then some… LOL… Today is December 18th. My surgery was the afternoon of December 13th, and I’ve been back home since noon on December 15th (yep…that’s less than 48 hours after I got off the operating table!). I have care at home 24 hours a day and am well fed and looked after, but am not yet allowed to drink wine 😦

So the surgery was a complicated one, and thankfully it did go better than expected, but we still have to deal with those two other tumours. These will be treated with radiation, and the treatment plan is underway (I have a Radiation Oncology appointment on Friday at Credit Valley). As many of you know, I’m also a patient at Princess Margaret, and the oncology team there has been looped in on this new development. Any proposed treatment plan will be reviewed by both teams – this is important because this cancer is the same one that I had in 2017. Which is actually a good thing: I’ve beat this one once, and I will beat it again.