Well… the website says it all.  On Friday, August 24th 2018 at around 12:15 pm… a general surgeon scooted his chair up to me and showed me a piece of paper that said……….  “diagnosis:  poorly differentiated mucinous adenocarcinoma with patchy signet ring cell features”………… There was obviously a bunch of other words on the page that we’ll get to later… but it’s hard to describe what goes through your head as you hear the words coming out of his mouth and you see the words on the page.  It’s as if time stops for a moment and you’re thinking… “Wow… this is really happening.  This exact moment is going to change everything I think of as normal.  This exact moment will change everything and everyone that means anything in my life.  This exact moment will reverberate through everything I am for the rest of my life.”…  It all began on…

Monday, August 13th… I woke up with an “oogy” stomach.  It never really went away the whole day.  I went to work and slogged through the day… but the stomach ache never subisded.  The next day the “oogy” stomach was gone… but I had a dull pain in my lower right abdominal area. Monica (my wife) had me go in to an urgent care clinic.  They sent me home with some Magneseum Sitrate and said to come back if I didn’t feel better.  The next day (after quite a bit of time in the bathroom) I didn’t feel any better.  The dull pain persisted and my wife had me go back in again.  This time they said I should probably come back in the next day for a CT Scan.  My wife insisted we get a CT Scan that evening.  So I went and checked myself in to the ER in Newberg, Oregon at 4:00 on Wednesday.  By 7:00 pm, they had taken my CT Scan, the surgeon had reviewed the findings and they were wheeling me in for a laproscopic appendectomy.  I went home that night at around 12:00 am.   Everything went fine… there was no reason to think anything was weird at all.  The surgeon told my wife that all had gone well and that I should recover normally.  One week later, my surgeons office began calling trying to set up a follow up appointment.   I made the appointment for Friday, August 24th at 11:45 am.  (Never schedule a follow up appointment for Friday by the way!!!)  And we return to the beginning of this post…

As he spoke, I could hear my heart beating in my mind… I could feel the blood rushing up through my face.  I looked over at my wife and began to realize the agonizing thoughts that were coursing through her mind.  I could go on for pages about how that 30 minutes felt and about the comet sized impact it had on my world and everything in it.  But the simple truth was… it was the moment I found out I had cancer.

I’ll use this website to document as much information as I can over the journey I’m now embarking on.  I really am so in the dark on just about everything.  As I learn… I’ll try to update and post any information that will help my friends and family understand where I’m at… And also… others who are on a similar to path.