The Importance of Being Your Own Advocate in Fighting Cancer<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nAn Introduction to Caregiving<\/h2>\n
Back in late 2003, Mike\u2019s routine yearly chest x-ray showed a \u201cspot\u201d that hadn\u2019t been there before.\u00a0 Immediately, our minds went to places it had never gone before \u2013 at first \u201cgood\u201d places (or the lesser of two evils) in the hopes that somehow this \u201cspot\u201d is going to be good news, not bad.\u00a0 We instantly thought of (grabbed onto really) \u201cValley Fever\u201d which is an ailment somewhat limited to California\u2019s San Joaquin Valley.\u00a0 And it is a disease that affects people in farming and similar occupations more than someone who works in an office.\u00a0 Since Mike taught Agriculture at the local community college and he spent some time working with commodities like fruit trees, grapes and other agricultural type products, we could see (we wanted to see<\/em>) a very real possibility that this was going to be Valley Fever. Valley Fever isn\u2019t fun but it\u2019s a walk in the park compared to renal cell that has metastasized in the lungs.<\/p>\nAs this new journey began to unfold in front of us (and definitely not a journey we wanted to take) and as we struggled to separate the good choices from the bad choices, Mike began going through a multitude of medical exams, scans, x-rays, blood tests, stress tests, biopsies, etc.; and I began what seemed like an endless search of the internet in the hopes that someone out there had walked this walk before and had recorded it for those of us about to follow.\u00a0 At the time \u2013 early 2004 \u2013 I don\u2019t think too many people were into \u201cblogging\u201d \u2013 at least not like it is done today.\u00a0 I kept a daily journal back then of what we were doing, what we were experiencing and feeling in the hopes that it would help me get through the day-to-day stuff.\u00a0 I also wanted this to be a diary for our children to read someday \u2013 especially if we didn\u2019t get our happily ever after \u2013 I wanted our adult daughter and son to know how hard their dad fought to stay with us and how much he loved them.<\/p>\n
[pullquote]Mike was very preoccupied with all of the procedures that he had to endure, so a lot of the questions that needed to be answered, the information that needed to be gathered and sorted and organized, fell to me to handle. <\/span>[\/pullquote]<\/h3>\nAt that time, I was still very unsophisticated and untrained in using the computer and getting the most out of what it had to offer us.\u00a0 \u00a0I spent endless hours trying to find out if there was something better than the HD IL-2 that was being offered. Via this new super highway of information, I \u201cwent\u201d to Canada, to Europe, to Asia and to South America in the hopes I could find a researcher or foundation that was on the brink of making history with a new formula. Along the way, I accidentally stumbled across what would now definitely qualify as a \u201cBlog\u201d kept by a man named Tom Brazaitis.\u00a0 At that time, Mr. Brazaitis was also a popular journalist for a newspaper in the Midwest and after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2000, he invited \u201cus\u201d to come along and share his ride.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t an easy blog for me to read because we were living parallel lives at the time.\u00a0 Tom was an excellent writer who chronicled his disease with intelligence and wit.\u00a0 He was also very articulate and very well informed.\u00a0 Tom passed away in 2004 and his \u201cblog\u201d, unfortunately, went with him a short time later.<\/p>\n
As I read and kept up with the entries that Tom was making in his journal about kidney cancer, I realized that we were mirroring the places and things that Tom had experienced.\u00a0 His storytelling was brutally honest and he didn\u2019t try to sugar coat anything.\u00a0 He told it just like it was and at times it was very hard to read.\u00a0 In fact, Mike never read any of what Tom wrote.\u00a0 He has let me do all of the gathering and then I would read or tell him what I thought he can handle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mike was very preoccupied with all of the procedures that he had to endure, so a lot of the questions that needed to be answered, the information that needed to be gathered and sorted and organized, fell to me to handle. At that time, I was still very unsophisticated and untrained in using the computer and getting the most out of what it had to offer us. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":893,"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions\/893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ackc.org\/jayedit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}