Lung Specialist

After I got back from the trip, I had an appointment to see a lung specialist (Dr. Rawson). After talking with him for a while, he seemed to be concerned about my rapid weight loss, shortness of breath and a couple of other symptoms that I noticed he reacted to a little differently when I talked about them. We scheduled a CT scan for the following Monday and planned on a Bronchoscope (sp?) for Tues. I went home feeling better because at least we had a direction now that seemed to offer hope of resolution. Until then it seemed like we were just “shooting on the dark” and “if this doesn’t work we will try something else”. Dr. Rawson did say that at that point “nothing was off the table”. He said it could be anything from aggravated pneumonia to Hodgkinsin’s disease to cancer and he did say the word cancer. He also said that I had a lot of fluid in the sack around my lungs and he wanted to drain the fluid and run tests on it and that would help my “shortness of breath”, because my lung was partially collapsed because of the excess fluid and we planned on draining it the following week. I called my sister Holly (in Ohio) and talked to her about some of this because I had a bad feeling and needed to talk to someone I could trust. She helped me a lot and then did her Mission President’s wife thing and started to research it for me. All her research did not lead to positive “anything” either. In fact she confirmed with her research what seemed to be what everyone else was alluding to and that was not happy.

My story of Cancer:

Early in the year (2008), I started having health problems that seemed to get worse and worse. I was living in Rapid City, South Dakota with a great family (the Anderson’s). I had gotten a job with the City of Rapid City and the Lord had told me to go. We spent the next 10 months trying to sell our home in St. George, but since we couldn’t sell it (bad time to sell) the family had to stay there. It was very hard.
I would have bad flu bouts. I had pains that seemed to not be handled by regular pain relievers and remedies. Many a night, I would find my self walking around my bed from one side to the other for hours because I could get no relief from the pain. My diabetes pills ran out and so I went to the doctor’s to get them refilled. After the checkup, the doctor decided to give me another drug to help with my kidney function and blood pressure called licinopril. The next time I got sick, I went back and I mentioned I had a cough that was annoying and wouldn’t go away. I also lost my voice and the doctor thought that was strange as well. He said that a persistent cough was a symptom in 10% of the people that take licinopril and are allergic to it so he took me off that. We spent the next few weeks trying to get rid of the cough and it got worse. It eventually got to the point where it was beginning to hurt a lot and I had a pretty significant residual pain in my chest. Then I started to get a pain in my left shoulder (on the top) that we thought we attributed to carrying my backpack on that shoulder all the time. One day I was very, very sick (thought it was flu or something) and had been extremely depressed about our inability to sell our house and live together as a family.
My Bishop in Rapid City felt impressed to drive out to the Anderson’s and gave me a blessing. (The Anderson’s are the great family that has adopted me in Rapid and taken me in for the past year) In the blessing the Bishop promised me two things that I distinctly remembered. First he commanded my body to heal itself and second he promised that it was time for “the trials to end”. Many times through the next few weeks, I wondered what this meant.
Next, I began to have pains in the small of my back as well. After trying just about everything he could think of the doctor finally pronounced that my white blood count was up and he finally saw a spot on the x-ray that told him I had pneumonia (right….. I wish). So he put me on anti-biotics (2 heavy doses) for 10 days right before I went to Dallas for a convention. In fact it was Sept 14th (my birthday) and I flew Julie down to meet me for the 4 days so we could spend some time together. We had a wonderful time and it was so important that we were able to spend that time together. I did have to try and go golfing (which was a big mistake) and the only way I survived was to take a lot of the pain medication I had begged the doctor for. Interestingly, when Julie and I were getting on different planes in Dallas to go home after our time together at the convention (she was returning to St. George and I was going back to Rapid City), her last words to me were to be sure and call her on Friday as soon as I was done at the doctor’s and “whatever you do, don’t call and tell me it is cancer”. I promised her and we left. I have had a couple of times in my life with her where I wish I could take back a promise or have done a better job at honoring my word. This was the beginning of a very long and amazing road into the world of cancer for me.