MSI Press Blog

As with Carl, many people have "signs" of cancer that can be interpreted either as something else quite mild or dismissed entirely as just a bad day or maybe I ate something bad yesterday. Otherwise quite healthy people simply ignore them as an annoyance. (Before cancer, Carl was sick just one day in his life -- 50 years earlier he threw up, once, on the lawn, from unsuspectingly drinking stagnant water the day while carrying out his Forest Service employee duties, Seriously. Never again did he ever throw up even after three rounds of chemotherapy, but he died, healthy, from cancer!)  This is the insidious nature of cancer. Often, you just do not know you have it because the signs are so innocuous until it has taken over your body and is in the winner's circle -- and you have an incredibly difficult battle to get your body back -- and many people lose that battle every single day. This is especially true of "toilet information." Change in bowel movement is prett

  By the time, Carl was diagnosed, his cancer was metastized to his liver, lungs, bones, and upper stomach. After many biopsies and scans, the primary could not be found, and the cancer was officially labeled Cancer of Unknown Primary . Impaired Mobility: harder and harder to walk and climb stairs     We associated this with worsening of gout, which had been present for more than a decade     This could have been due as well to cancer-related hypercalcemia and bone cancer Frequent urination     We associated this with normal aging     This could have been related to  prostate cancer (not the case with Carl but the case with many) Pain in the side     We associated this with a gallbladder attack; it appeared similar to what our daughter, who had her gallbladder removed, had gone through.     We did not know that this same kind of pain is diagnostic of liver cancer. Frequent dozing off while working on the computer or watching television We associated this associated with  fatigue from t

  Carl dozing with his beloved cat, Intrepid both died of cancer, were cremated, and share a vault in local cemetery's columbarium Carl was often dozing during the last months of his life, perhaps as much as the last year. He had had uncontrolled sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome for years. For the former, her refused treatment; the CPAC and his beard battled for dominance, and his beard won. RLS was tames with medicine.  When Carl would doze off, I just assumed he was tired because he did not get adequate amounts of sleep. However, something else of which I was completely unaware was probably at work: dying. The dozing off became longer and more frequent during the last 2-3 months of his life, and during the last week, he moved from being mostly interactive to being mostly somnambulant. Carl dozed off and on during the day a lot even as much as a year before being diagnosed with advanced stage 4 cancer of unknown primary . Indeed, some of it was very likely a manifestation of

  Colorectal cancer has a life expectancy of 4-6 months if discovered in stage 4. If discovered in stage 1-2, life expectancy is 5 years. (Note: Carl's Cancer Compendium provides longevity statistics for a wide range of cancers.) So many people die from colon cancer and colorectal cancer after brief periods of chemotherapy, if that, a imperative exists for watching for early signs of cancer is not heeded (or in some cases, they are simply missed or misinterpreted). I speak from personal experience because although Carl died from cancer of unknown primary ( CUP ), his oncologist was convinced that the original cancer was gastro-intestinal in nature although the colon was clear of the cancer by the time the cancer had reached stage 4 (which can happen in cases of CUP). So, assuming the oncologist was right about the original cancer, did Carl actually survive the 5 years without knowing it? Discovery at late stage does not mean the cancer arrived late stage -- it may have taken mon

  Looking back on Carl's cancer, our cats' cancers, and cancers among friends and family, we should have seen the signs, which would have led to better decisions and, likely, better outcomes. But they were small changes, slow changes that we got used to gradually without thinking back to what things used to be like.  One day, Carl forgot where the brake on the car was and pushed the gas pedal instead. Scary! Could happen to anyone, right? That was a few months before his late stage 4 metastatic cancer diagnosis, with hypercalcemia (which really messes up the brain). A small sign, but we missed it. His growing tendence to leave dishes to do until the next morning of plants to water the next day. Lazy, right? That started maybe a year out before the cancer diagnosis, likely about the time his organs were being attacked and overwhelming his immune system -- and likely his energy. A small sign, but we missed it. There were more. If we even noticed them, we dismissed them all as  ag

  This tweet: Erika on Twitter: "What don’t we (cancer peeps) ever talk about how much cancer effects our feet? Or am I the only one? My nails suck. So many cracks. My toes even look different, I swear." / Twitter brought up the question of the relationship between cancer and the feet. Some signs of cancer that get ignored until too late are edema, cracks in the skin of the feet, and neuropathy -- likely because they are also signs of other things as well, and nearly know thinks of cancer first. Cancer is the disease that creeps up on you very quietly, then taps, says "boo," and your whole life changes on the spot. But there is also foot skin cancer -- melanoma and other kinds. Check it out HERE. For other Cancer Diary posts, click  HERE . Blog editor's note: As a memorial to Carl, and simply because it is truly needed, MSI Press is now hosting a web page,  Carl's Cancer Compendium , as a one-stop starting point for all things cancer, to make it easier for t

Carl frequently complained of being cold during the last two months of living/dying with cancer. Even with the heat at, for me an uncomfortable, 72 degrees (when we typically maintain it at a comfortable 66 degrees). Even when wearing a sweater or even something heavier and smothered in blankets. He was always complaining about being cold, and only after he died did I find out why -- and that he really was very cold because body temperature drops when someone is dying. We were constantly struggling over how to compromise on temperature. My son and I were extremely uncomfortable with the amount of heat Carl would set the thermostat for, as well as having concerns with the cost of the amount of gas needed to keep the house so hot (dying can create immense financial stress -- a topic Cancer Diary will address in the future).  In general, cold registered for me, having grown up in Maine and having spent a few winters in Siberia, pictured above, on a very different scale from the perceptio

Carl, so proud in his new, smaller, fully fitting Scott vest   Indeed, several months before Carl was diagnosed with advanced metastatic cancer (stage 4), he lost quite a bit of weight. Nearly 50 pounds overnight. Now, he was big, very big. Any weight loss, in our thinking at the time, was to be applauded. And so, he ordered s smaller Scott vest and showed off his new slimmer self. (Not slim, mind you, but slimmer -- he was still nearly 300 pounds when he died.) What we did not realize -- and I certainly wish we had is that such a weight loss is not to be celebrated. It is a sign of dying, or at least, of advanced cancer. Instead of showing off his success ("achieved" -- more accurately, "experienced" -- though he was not on a particularly regimented diet), he should have been rushing to his doctor and asking, "What is wrong with this picture?" Perhaps, hopefully, the doctor would have figured out the cancer diagnosis early enough to do something about it,

  It seems that the most commonly shared experience by most cancer patients is that they miss the signs of cancer until often it is too late (stage 4 or 4) when discovered. That is because the signs do not leap out, generally. The following article does a good job of sharing the signs as well as providing a list of risk factors (if you have those, best to keep an eye out for signs) for one of the most deadly cancers: pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer (msn.com) For other Cancer Diary posts, click  HERE . Blog editor's note: As a memorial to Carl, and simply because it is truly needed, MSI Press is now hosting a web page,  Carl's Cancer Compendium , as a one-stop starting point for all things cancer, to make it easier for those with cancer to find answers to questions that can otherwise take hours to track down on the Internet and/or from professionals. The CCC is expanded and updated weekly. As part of this effort, each week, on Monday, this blog will carry an informative, ca

  Recently, a Cancer Diary post addressed what all too often happens when cancer is diagnosed at a late stage, especially at advanced Stage 4. But how do you get that far without a diagnosis? In Carl's case, we missed the early signs, ignored the warning signs, and excused his bad behavior. Early signs The early signs were mostly associated with our expectations of aging. He was getting into his seventh decade. So, we were not surprised when he was no longer up for hiking mountains or spending eight hours a day on the job. In fact, I was always coaxing him to put just a little more time into working since working from the same office, I was quite aware of how much effort I was putting in on a daily and even hourly basis than he was. I chalked it up to his being lazier than usual as he aged. (Work was never where he wanted to concentrate his efforts, anyway. He was an ESTP on the MBTI, someone who loved to play, put things off, and spend time in the outdoors.) But even some of that