Stand Up To Cancer

This is the second installment of Ben's blog; to read the first part, click here.

After my December PET/CT revealed a suspicious area, I went in for a biopsy on the21st. At first I was smiling, taking pictures of my naked butt in the hospital bed. Cut to two hours later, when the surgeon hugs my mom and cries, "It's Hodgkin's."My mom pulls it together like she always does and comes to see me in agonizing pain in ICU. She tells me, but I can't retain water, if you know what I mean.

After speaking with my oncologist, we knew that the next step was going to be a stem-cell transplant (standard protocol for relapsed Hodgkin's). The question was, where? City of Hope is one of three hospitals in the United States that does these transplants in their sleep. So if any of you know my mom, you can guess where we went. Yeah, you guessed it! Not only one of the best hospitals, but she got me in with the best doctor, the doctor who wrote the first book on bone-marrow transplants in 1978, Dr. Stephen Forman! A little fun fact: City of Hope does about 500 transplants a year, while the average hospital does about a hundred. Oh, by the way, COH is also in the middle of nowhere. I mean, don't go past the hospital too far or you might feel a little "uncomfortable." It is in Duarte, between Monrovia and Arcadia. We went in for the consultation on January 12th, and I started chemotherapy on the 15th.

First, let me tell you about Dr. Forman. It was like I met Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen at the same time. But this guy was way smarter! I felt completely safe and knew that this doctor was going to save my life. He explained the processes to me, not my mom, which, if you were wondering, is the best thing a doctor can do. Talk to the patient, not his mother! It killed her, but she's used to it by now.

Here is the process. Stay with me. Focus. Take notes. I am going to be having an Autologus Stem-Cell Transplant/Rescue. They will take my own stem cells from my veins and use them to re-grow my immune system. The other places you can get stem cells are from somebody else, from umbilical cords or from the bone. My cancer is not yet in my bone marrow; it lies deep within my blood on some unknown cellular level (anybody cracked the code of cancer yet???). So they can use my own stem cells for the transplant.

Imagine this next part as a calendar. I will be going in for salvation chemotherapy called ICE every three weeks. I will be in an outpatient facility for one day and inpatient for the next two. I will do this probably three times. So we're at about nine weeks. This chemotherapy will hopefully put my body into remission. When I say remission, I mean that there will be no visible traces of cancer on a PET/CT scan. So why not stop there, right? Well, as I said earlier, we know it will come back, because it is deeper, on a cellular level that nobody can see. This much they apparently know about Hodgkin's.

In between the second and third ICE treatment, I will have a mini-surgery to get some type of Hickman catheter put into my chest. I will wake up and they will start my third cycle of ICE while I am in the hospital. After those nine weeks, I will rest for two weeks or so before going into City of Hope so they can harvest my stem cells. It's about a six-hour process, and the technology is amazing. Check this out: I will sit in a chair and they will take a lot of blood out of me, but give me back everything but my stem cells. You may ask, why stem cells? Well, blood is made up of five parts: white blood cells, red blood cells, plasma, platelets, and stem cells. Stem cells are the cells that can become any one of the four other parts of the blood, or mutate and become cancer. How's that science tip for you? Now go impress your friends.

After they harvest my stem cells, and they say they have enough for a transplant, BOOM! That's when the crap hits the fan . . .

To learn more, visit Ben's website: cuck-fancer.com.