You always hear people say that their lives couldn't have been more "normal" before getting diagnosed with cancer. And that would certainly describe our case. Jared was extremely active, which is why he realized something was wrong. It all happened very quickly. On Thursday, October 13th, he spent the evening at the gym lifting weights and playing basketball. He noticed that one side of his body seemed stronger than the other, but didn't think much of it. While playing basketball, he said he couldn't keep his balance. He said as he would shoot he would just lose the ball, and if he jumped to block a shot, he would lose his balance and fall back against the wall. The way he describes it, I'm sure the others thought he was drunk! On Friday, October 14th, Jared played golf for a work tournament, and I went to lunch with some friends. He said he played the worst round of golf in his life, to the point that it really embarrassed him. He said he couldn't quite hit the ball square on. That afternoon we went to the park down the street with the kids. It was a beautiful day and many neighbors were there. Jared played football with Jace and some neighbors. When we went home to make dinner, he told me that at the park his body was acting weird, and that his foot kept lagging behind, like he was losing movement or feeling in his leg. He also told me of the other occurrences he'd had previous, and I insisted he go to the ER. I thought he was having signs of a stroke, because it was all in his right side. He had been hospitalized a few months prior for pulmonary embolisms (at the time we thought it was a freak thing, now we obviously think it was cancer-related), and he had just gotten off of blood thinners, so it made sense to me that it would be something related to that. I certainly didn't expect what we were to find out!
He went to the E.R. and they took an MRI. They saw a large mass in his brain. The ER doctor told him the mass was a cancer called Astrocytoma and told him he needed to go to another hospital that had specialists. He called and told me the news. For some reason the word cancer didn't scare me. I was unbelievably calm that night. I picked him up from one hospital and took him to the other. We had to wait until morning to meet with the specialist.
Saturday morning the neurosurgeon came to meet with us. Jared had told him that his mother had passed away a couple years earlier from Glioblastoma, and that he wanted to eliminate that possibility as quickly as possible. The doctor went to study the MRI, and returned with his findings. He said that the mass was either a large infection that would need to be drained through surgery, or unfortunately, because of the location, it was Glioblastoma. That was the moment we both panicked. We had just been through this whole thing with his mom, so we knew exactly what Glioblastoma was. In fact, we had known of five people with Glioblastoma, and none of them had made it even two years. Jared wanted to get the surgery over as quickly as possible to know for sure what it was.
He had another MRI, this time with little markers on his head so that the doctor had some reference points during surgery. We had decided before-hand that if it was, in fact, Glioblastoma, that we would like the doctor to go ahead with the surgery to remove the tumor. The initial procedure was an exploratory surgery, and we were hoping that would be it. We called his brother, Neil, to come and give him a blessing prior to surgery. At this point the doctor was pretty confident it was an infection because of how quickly the symptoms had come on. The blessing didn't give me the assurance I was looking for, and in fact, it did quite the opposite. The blessing was definitely indicating that this was something bigger than an infection. I think I knew at that point it was cancer. At the end of the blessing, there were promises made, promises that seemed impossible. Surgery began at about 11:30am.
After I left him, we quickly had a large group of family members at the hospital, eagerly waiting to hear what the doctor had found. At about 2:30pm the doctor came out and told us that he had tried to drain the mass, but nothing was coming out. So he removed some samples. He had taken four samples. Two of them appeared to be active tissue, and the other two were dead tissue, or necrosis, giving him a pretty clear indication that this was, in fact, a very aggressive cancer. We were devastated! We decided to go in a room and say a prayer before telling the doctor to go ahead with the much more invasive surgery to remove the tumor. The doctor told me that he had no idea how long the remaining surgery would take. He said he would take as long as he needed.
The next few hours were the darkest hours of my life. I thought of my kids, I thought of Jared having to hear the devastating news, I thought about what the future could hold. I was scared. And I certainly doubted the promises in the blessing.
The doctor returned earlier than I had expected. He had finished surgery by about 7:30pm. His demeanor had changed. He told me that the surgery had gone well. He told me that when he went in, the tumor did not have the characteristics that he was expecting the see at all. The color and texture were different than he had expected, but even bigger - Glioblastoma has little spider legs, or root systems, that are impossible to get out. This tumor was encapsulated, or self-contained. He was confident that he had removed as close to the entire thing as possible. So he didn't really know what to tell me. I think he was confused. So we knew it was cancer, we just didn't know what kind. But I was elated!! I knew at that moment I had seen my first miracle, and I couldn't go back to the dark place I had been in moments before.
It took a LONG 12 days to finally get the actual diagnosis back. They had sent the tumor to the in-house lab, but because there was some confusion, they sent it to Stanford to be tested. We held up okay for about a week, but after that the wait was really starting to wear on everybody. We just wanted to know what it was so we could start planning. Jared had already met with the oncologists at Huntsman to try to plan treatment - because of the samples they were pretty confident it was Glioblastoma. The doctor finally called me with the results on October 27th. The diagnosis was, in fact, Glioblastoma Multiforme, but it was in a different classification called "Giant Cell." Patients generally did better with giant cell, because it is encapsulated, making treatments more effective. And it is really rare (which is why the doctor hadn't ever seen it).
So we had our answer. I think at that point we were all okay with it. We knew it could've been worse, so we were just grateful for what we had.
