On October 26, 2023, John was diagnosed with an aggressive small cell carcinoma, which appears to be from his time serving in Afghanistan. He shared the letter below with family in November, and will share updates here.
Dear Family, Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you’ve all been having a wonderful year and have found plenty of things to be thankful for. Personally, my year has had ups and downs like anyone else’s, up to this fall when essentially the bottom dropped out, and I was given news that I had a pretty hard time with. What I thought was a kidney stone turned out to be a mass on my bladder, which we discovered was not only cancerous, but a Small Cell Endocrine Carcinoma, which is very common in lung cancer, and has a very poor survival rate. Due to the urgency of being treated as soon as possible, I began a course of chemotherapy treatments the next day, in-patient at the hospital. The treatment is palliative, and the expectation of survival is 4-12 months. We are hoping to connect with Mayo for a review & potentially different treatment options, but that has not happened yet. For now, there will be four rounds of chemo, three weeks apart. That's it. It's been a couple weeks now since all of that, and next week I will have my second round of chemo. Thankfully I haven’t had any side effects yet, and I’m hopeful this second round will be the same. My third course of treatment will be just before Christmas, and I’m hopeful I will be physically well enough to come see all of you again. Hoping that we can find a time to gather the week after Christmas. Please keep our family in your thoughts and prayers. We’re having a pretty difficult time with this, but look forward to some positive news following all of the treatment. Love to all of you. John
So leave it to my cancer to take away my favorite things. "What things?" This time is the taste of sweet things. Ugh. Now everything I eat that might ordinarily seem sweet just tastes boring and lifeless. Go figure. I guess I've had my last DQ blizzard for awhile. 😤
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