I guess I'll just roll it back to the Genesis of the situation at hand, that way there's a clear beginning to the eventual end of this cancer party trick my body hooked me up with. A few months ago I started noticing a lump under my right armpit and was sure it was either swollen lymph-nodes from Covid-19, my body working off an infection from a cut from working on my house or hell maybe even just from a radical hangover. As time went on, the lump was still there so I thought it had to be something from my deodorant so I switched to all "organic, don't pannic products" and was sure this was going to do the trick. Unfortunately it didn't and as time went on it was slowly getting bigger so in November I went to go get it checked out.
The first day I went to get it looked at I went to a walk in clinic and pretty much scared the living crap out of this super nice walk-in Doc. His eyes went huge and he's all "do you have a primary care doctor? If so, go see him now, I've never seen that before". LMAO so off to my Primary Care doc who's eyes also enlarged to the size of grapefruits 'pon seeing the swelling in my arm. He immediately scheduled me for an Ultra Sound which immediately sent me to a Biopsy tech which then sent a frenzy of phone calls from various offices trying to tell me the results first. Luckily my primary care doc, who's the man, got to me first and told me to set up a zoom call with him which in my heart I knew meant... "ya got the cancer kid..." and thats exactly word for word what he said... Just kiddin, he said "Connor the results came back and unfortunately there is absolutely no doubt about it, you have Hodgkins Lymphoma. I am not an Oncologist so I cannot answer your next 35 questions but I'm setting you up with one now". So he sets me up with this awesome Oncologist named Dr. Sudarsan Vishnu Kollimuttathuillam (Dr. K for short). He let me know there was a series of tests I needed to complete to figure out the staging so we could work on a treatment schedule. So after some blood work and a PET CT Scan we sat down to discuss and he let me know that I had Stage 4 HL and that the cancer cells had spread from my Right Axillary Lymph Nodes to my Stomach Lymph Nodes, my Paratracheal Lymph Nodes and to some region behind my Diaphragm. This staging more than doubled my treatment rounds from 3 months of chemotherapy to 6.5-7 months of chemotherapy.
Woah... whatch you talkin bout Willis? Stage 4 Cancer? Chemotherapy? These are cards for Hollywood Executives to spice up shitty movies and throw in some curveball drama, not actual reality. Trying to process that conversation with my Doc was a little challenging right away because it felt like my eyes were shutting down on me and my ears were going deaf. But after doing some reading on what I actually have, Classical Hodgkins Lymphoma, I realized that I am the lucky one! If there is a cancer to beat, its Hodgkins Lymphoma... every day people wake up to news that they have terminal cancer or to a cancer with less than 50% survival statistics. I got so lucky, with Classical Hodgkins Lymphoma I have over a 90% survival rate. I've got the best doctors guiding me through the process and equally importantly I have the best care and support at home with Camille, the rest of my family and friends. Camille is the cornerstone on the whole operation. She has made the whole thing so smooth and literally fun. After hearing the Stage 4 news we hung up the phone and immediately threw a trip to Hawaii on the cards and took off the following week. We had such a blast, surfing, hiking and getting mentally and physically prepared for the journey were on now. Absolutely no way I could go through all this without Camille and without the support of my family and friends. Love you guys all so much and a huge thanks in advance for all the love and support over the foreseeable future!
I can't wait to throw my cancer down and smite its ruin upon the mountainside, then throw such a big party at my house that my neighbors move out of the country from the pure shock and horror of the amount of energy and power they just felt/witnessed from the comforts of their beds.
