A little background

1st post... I'm not a great designer by any means so I'm sure this page will change when my wife takes a look at it.  I honestly don't know what I'm doing there, sorry...


Roughly 6 years ago, just 2 months after marrying my sweetheart Noelle, I was diagnosed with Stage I Testicular cancer.  I had surgery to remove the tumor.  Even though the doctors were pretty sure that I was cured with surgery, I didn't want to take any chances so I went through 6 weeks of chemotherapy.  Home Free!! Or so I thought...  Cancer is has got to be one of the sneakiest most devastating diseases that someone will ever have to deal with.  I say devastating because even though technology is amazing and survival rates keep going up and up; mentally, it can just destroy you if you aren't careful. Its never straight-forward but comes at you sideways and when you least expect it. Sorry, more on that later.... There are actually very few people who even know what we went through, we only told our very good friends and some of the people in our church in Texas.  I regret not telling more people. 

Some facts...
Testicular cancer is most prevalent cancer in Caucasian adult males ages 15-40.  Roughly 1 in 250 (or 0.4%) of us will have to deal with this in our lifetime.  If it is caught early, before it has metastasized into the lymph node system, the cure rate is nearly 100%.  Even if you catch it late and the tumor has metastasized into the lungs, brain or other parts of the body (as with Lance Armstrong who had more than 10 tumors all throughout his body), the survival rate is greater than 85% with chemotherapy.

This is why I regret not being more open.  If you are a male in this age group, you HAVE TO DO SELF EXAMS!  The better you know yourself the more likely you are to realize that there is something abnormal.  And if there is even a slight question, go see a Urologist and have an ultrasound done.  There is absolutely no reason not to.  

So, we endured cancer, graduated grad school and moved to Spokane, WA.  We love it here and have spent the last 4 years making a home in the beautiful Inland Northwest.  We spend every spare second on the lake or in the mountains in the summer time.  In the winter time, I stay very active in 2-3 basketball leagues and we just try to maintain our sanity until the next spring/summer.  We love it.  Even after all that nasty chemotherapy we were able to conceive our beautiful baby girl naturally.  Brynnley is the light of our lives and has to be one of the smartest, cutest kids on the planet :-)  Her eyes are going to make her mommy and daddy lots of money one day :-)  Here are just a few recent pictures taken a few months after her 2 year old birthday.  

 

And, for those of you who didn't know, Noelle is now 5 months pregnant!  Another little girl is due January 28th or so, once again conceived naturally!  We can't be more excited and Brynnley can't wait to be be a big sister.  She is so excited!

So, as you can probably guess by now, our world was turned upside down a few weeks ago when my cancer returned.  This time, I'm not keeping quiet.  We've made some great friends, we're very active in our church.  Also, because of my job and Noelle's job we're pretty connected with the medical community in Spokane.  I hope that people knowing about our fight will help to spread the word and raise some awareness.  It's not an easy thing to talk about but it is so important.   

In my next post I will detail a little bit more of whats been going on in the last few weeks.  My goal is to update this blog everyday as I work my way through more surgery and chemotherapy.  I'm doing this as an outlet for myself, an easy update for family and friends and to spread awareness that testicular cancer is very real and needs to be openly discussed within families and by all men.  I'm sure that some days will be mundane and might just be a sentence or two. I'm sure some days it won't be pretty and might be hard to read but its reality.  So, here we go again.....