Cancer:

And that's when we get the news from his last round of tests. While trying to diagnose the infection they had suspected it might be cancer as opposed to bacteria. They did a colonoscopy and bronchoscopy and took biopsy samples of his lymph nodes as well. The in house team of doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong and they had to send it off to a few different labs. Originally, they had thought it was gallbladder cancer, then liver cancer, followed by pancreatic cancer, then bladder cancer, someone tested for lung cancer, and then colon cancer, thankfully all came back negative. So after a week of hearing pretty much every type of cancer being tossed around and coming back false, we didn't think much of the diagnosis of esophageal cancer. We had just assumed it would come back later as negative too, just like all the others.

However, on Tuesday December 12th the top pathologist in the country from Cleveland Clinic in Ohio had sent us his report saying that it was in fact advanced staged esophageal cancer. The Memorial hospitals have been really awful about communication both with the patient and between doctors, so we had no idea what was going on. I had to ask my friends in the medical field (Shout out to kidney specialist Dr. Rohan an awesome friend and classmate from UF and my new buddy GI oncology pathologist Dr. Sandy) to read and translate the reports, images, results, etc. and tell us what was going on pretty much from the beginning. A huge thank you to them during the entire process and still now. So back to Memorial...they signed my dad up for radiation and chemotherapy before ever speaking with him. Thankfully he insisted on having a PET scan on Thursday December 21st before treatment began because that completely changed the treatment plan.