routinely seen in the hallway pushing my intravenous trolly. I calculated that the hallway was exactly 70 steps in one direction and I was able to walk just over a mile. The surgeons said that I was the ideal patient because of this routine exercise. My good buddy, Prof Gerry O’ Driscoll, came to visit me quite often as he is the head of the largest cardiology practice in the hospital. I had a business meeting one day, and Gerry loaned me his office to convene my meeting. It was quite funny as everything looked normal except for my wrist band that revealed that I was actually a patient. My business colleagues thought it was quite funny but I appreciated their understanding. After returning home, the area on my leg where they harvested my skin became infected and I had to get that under control. It was not nice and at times painful but after about a week it settled down.
A couple weeks later and I was off to another hospital to have another tumor removed from my right lung. For this the cardiothoracic surgeon needed to remove a lobe from my lung. To do this he performed a thoracotomy which is a large incision from my waist to my shoulder. Immediately following surgery, I was in intense pain. I was hooked up to a device that allowed me to administer my own pain killer. But I was really in pain and it didn’ t seem to be working. The nurses pushed additional narcotics on me and I complied. I should not have done this and I was in no condition to even make this decision at the time. Soon after they gave me this additional medicine I threw up and I was feeling very sick. Getting out of bed was painful and difficult. I had two drains into my lung, an intravenous hookup in my arm and a catheter in my bladder. The physical therapist came by to walk me around the ward with all of these tubes and I managed to do it. Soon after, the tubes, catheter and IV were taken out. The food at this private hospital was absolutely terrible. I was unable to eat any of that garbage that they called food. This put extra burden on Mimi and Luke to provide food for me. After about 5 days in the hospital, I started jogging around the ward. I was in the cardiothoracic ward and it was adjacent to the coronary intensive care unit. As I jogged, the nurses would cheer me on and some of the patients moved to the entrance of their rooms and cheered me as well. I do not think that anyone had ever jogged in this ward before. A couple days later they discharged me and I went home. After a few days at home, I developed some very bad pain on my ribs that was later diagnosed as neuropathic pain that happens in a small percentage of patients.
A couple of weeks later I had another PET scan and then visited my oncologist to start my chemotherapy. He informed me that the PET scan now showed that I had 14 new tumors in my liver. This was awful news. The tumors that were previously removed from my chest were sent to a special laboratory in the United States for analysis. This laboratory provides molecular profiling that is used to match the tumor with chemotherapy that could be effective. My tumor showed that it was sensitive to platinum so a chemo mixture was used that had platinum in it. After two rounds of this awful chemotherapy, another PET scan revealed that the tumors were increasing in size and that the chemo was ineffective. This really sucked as going through two round of chemo was the toughest thing that I had ever done, not to mention the $ 7,000 out of pocket cost for the laboratory analysis.
The oncologist then suggested that I should have another procedure to try and eliminate my liver tumors. The procedure is called SIR-Spheres and interestingly this treatment has been discovered and commercialized in Western Australia and is used worldwide. It uses micro-spheres to deliver targeted internal radiation therapy to the liver via a catheter that is inserted into the liver by a radiologist. The idea is to cut off the blood flow to the tumors to shrink the tumors. This was done and a chaser of heavy chemo therapy was given afterwards. The results are unknown at the date of this publication, however, after two weeks, I have become extremely lethargic. The latest treatment involves a therapy called monoclonal antibodies( mAb) that delivers cancer medicines specifically to cancer cells. A PET scan has been scheduled in the next 6 weeks and hopefully, the liver tumors have decreased and there are no other tumors that have popped up in other organs.
Although I am optimistic of staying around a bit longer, I recognize that this may not be the case, despite all best efforts and I may have to bend over and kiss my ass goodbye.
BARRY STEVEN EPSTEIN- PhotoAutobiography DRAFT 154 of 156