Monday night is when we shop at Costco and we saw a couple of parents from our hockey team there last night. It is one of the only nights during the week that we do not have any hockey so it works out well. After walking throughout Costco, it makes me a bit tired, so Mel tells me to go sit in the food court while we wait. I am not sure how much energy I will have as things progressed but near the end last time we got a wheelchair for me to go around in. This time I might get one earlier, but I do not have the upper strength this year to push it around. Electric wheelchairs are a bit pricey and I do not think that I actually need it all of the time. We will apply for an accessible parking pass though to make things a bit easier for me hopefully. This is also the best time to go to Wonderland or to Disney World as the accessible pass will make travel so much easier!
Yesterday we had our consult with the medical assistant and we have our initial meeting with the doctors today. The medical assistant from yesterday lives in a climate that does not have much snow, so when I showed her what our yard and street looked like she thought that it was beautiful. She said that the doctors were going to review the case and then get back to me in the next 2 or 3 days at the latest. Last night I got an email and a WhatsApp message from her, from what was approximately 2am her time. They wanted to schedule a meeting with me and the doctors for today but it required me to send them a photo of a my passport and to pay for the consult. I have never done an international bank transfer before and did this morning. It is not the same as when we do transfers in Canada. Canada has a pretty awesome system for transferring money when you compare it to other places. I think that it is going to the right place and I just had to show proof that I sent the money as opposed to confirming that it was done. I should have totally scammed them and faked it. That would have set us up on the right foot.
The meeting with the doctors went well and confirmed everything that Mel and I knew. Something that always comes up though is that everyone is surpised that I am so positive and upbeat. I made some jokes and comments about how we are excited to go to Spain for the food and the tapas are delicious. The doctors laughed and said it was nice to see that I could still joke around. It was the same with the doctors at Princess Margaret. It makes me wonder how do most cancer patients act. I have seen the ones in the cancer center and a lot of them are a bit depressed. This is only a minor case of Stage 4 gastric cancer that has metastasised in my abdomen. The doctors said that this is the most difficult one to treat as it is normally diffused. They had also informed us that this one also has one of the best positive responses to the Pressurized Intraperitoneal Aerosol Chemotherapy (PIPAC) treatment. We knew that the cytoreduction surgery was off the table as well as the Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy (HIPEC) procedure prior to this. Some good news from this is that in 10-15% of the patients who receive PIPAC it can reduce the size of the cancer so that cytoreduction surgery can occur. Which means that the cancer can be removed from the body, the only effective method of curing the cancer. I told them that it seemed quite positive and a high percentage. I thought that they were awesome odds.
What the treatment will look like is I go to Spain minimum of 3 times, in between some of the sessions of chemotherapy that I receive. Right now that would mean sometime in April, around the time of tryouts. If Xavier makes AAA then he can come with us to Spain, if he has to tryout for AA then he has to stay and make one of those teams or go play high school next year. I think it would be great motivation for him. Make AAA and you win a trip to Spain! I get treatment for chemo approximately every 2 weeks and this treatment replaces the third cycle of treatment. Since it falls around Easter though they are recommending that I get the chemotherapy treatment here locally and then go, so it would be 3 treatments and then I get to go to Spain. I would need to go at least 3 times before I can see the positive impacts of it. This is where things get a bit complicated. They did not really know the cost and we need to wait until we hear back from the hospital, but it is a flat rate for procedures for international patients, so no matter how long I am there once I am admitted it is one rate. Normally for international patients I will need to be there for 2 days. Mel gets to go out gallivanting in Barcelona for 2 days while I am in the hospital. Local patients can go home after 1 day, but for international they like to monitor it a bit longer. We can go for 4-5 days I think, go down the day before and then fly back the day afterwards. I am not sure if we would want to schedule an extra day after in case there is a complication and then we can fly back. What they will do is open me up laproscopic go check things out and then spray the chemo drug directly inside and do a quick biopsy to see how the cnacer is doing. They will give me a report after each session so that I can share it with my doctors. The only small thing that makes this difficult is the cost associated with the treatment. It is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination and we will need to figure out how to pay for all of this seeing as I need to have minimum of 3 treatments to see an impact. They did say that PIPAC was fantastic for controlling ascites and reducing that so it will help me out most definitely with eating.
The next steps are to check in with the local hospitals and see if they will cover this. Mel is also trying to see if she can apply to the government to get this treatment covered, but it does not necessarily look super promising for that. I think that they key is for me to go buy a lottery ticket and just win. That way I can fly an entourage with me when I go and look super important. Overall I see all of this as a positive though as we have viable options to help treat the cancer and hopefully actually eradicate it. The only downside is that this treatment is considered experimental in Canada while the rest of the world has this has a regular standard of care. The doctors that we spoke to are world renowned leading experts in this and learned and worked with the pioneer of the HIPEC methodology so I think we are in good hands. I got a good vibe from these doctors and I tend to trust my gut a lot with feelings for people.
We will see what happens with the consult at Mt. Sinai before we make our next plans. Mel would like the kids to come the first time as we do not know if we will go back. We have enough points that we can all fly business class without much issue. The concern that I have though is it will occur during tryouts and I am not sure if I want to have him decide what to do in that situation. If for some reason we delay it slightly and go closer to the end of April then that will work out for the best. We will not know however until we get closer to the travel dates and see when the tryout schedules are. Looking online right now it is showing as April 21st to 27th so this might work out well if we go April 7th to 14th.
Quoc Hao