It’s Cancer…Part 1

 Since you have made your way to our blog we are going to assume that by now you know, Nick has Cancer. So many times we have thought, how did we end up here? 

In March Nick was shaving his neck when he noticed a lump in his neck. The lump wasn’t hard but rather squishy. We had just started a new job and didn’t have insurance so we went to a clinic to have it checked out. The said that it could be a number of things but was 98% sure it wasn’t cancerous. There was no pain in his neck at all so the both of us weren’t too worried about it. 

Nick found a care provider and set up an appointment for May 1st, which was the first day we would have insurance. Once we had the appointment she recommended an ENT. The ENT referred him to have an ultrasound done. After the ultrasound he had a biopsy, CT scan and another biopsy. We received the dreaded news on a Tuesday that the biopsy showed positive for Squamous Cell Carcinoma. My heart literally fell into my stomach when we got the phone call. My family has such a history with cancer so of course my mind just raced. Even though our ENT said that it was treatable and curable I feared for the worst. Our main concern is if it had spread into his body. The ENT also said that it had to have a place that it was coming from since it was in his neck. We were immediately scheduled for a PT Scan. Nick and I have a friend who is an oncologist and we got his results really quickly so I sent them to her immediately. She said exactly what we needed to hear, “it hasn’t spread.” We were so thankful! The Lord had protected us! 

When we showed up at the ENT office there were about 10 people there to work on his case. Each of them played a role in how we were going to proceed with his treatments. It’s there that we found that Nick had a grape size lump on the back of his tongue in his lingual tonsil on the right side. The lump that we found is on the left side of his neck. The ENT told us that it was stage 2 because it was in his neck and the host was in his tongue.  The doctors all agreed that we would go the radiation/chemo route and not do surgery. We knew we had a long road ahead of us. 

We next met with the radiologist. This day was so hard for us as he had to tell us all of the worst that could happen, all the symptoms, possibly feeding tube and the possibility of a surgery even after all of this. Nick’s oncologist is Dr. Dugan and Nick jokingly calls him Dr. Doom because of all of the news we got that day. We later saw his hematologist for the chemo portion. 

It was decided…7 weeks of radiation and 7 rounds of chemo…