First Entry!

Today is my first post on my blog about my battle with Ewing's Sarcoma. The main purpose of this post is to get my readers to know a little bit about me, and to provide a little background of this cancer that I have.

First and foremost I am 19 years old, live in a family of 5 with two great younger brothers, and loving parents. I love to play sports, video games, and I'm very passionate about technology. I don't really have a favorite sports team because I don't like to watch sports, but my favorite sport to play is basketball. I'm not much of a bragger, but I am very good at basketball because I'm very athletic. I can dunk easily. Check it out... mike's dunks on youtube. I am a sophomore student at Penn State University majoring in Computer Science. I'm also from Pennsylvania, in the small Mountaintop area. 

Personally, I am a very reserved person, I like to keep to myself. It might be surprising to you that someone that is so reserved would make a blog about such a private thing as their health, but I don't see it as that at all. I see this diagnosis of this rare cancer as an opportunity to spread my experience to people that are newly diagnosed and may not be sure of how it will affect them. You see so many bad stories of cancer patients in the media, and my goal is to give people a good story. 

My Family

Me, my cousins, and Grandma

Now onto what this blog will be mainly about...my battle with Ewing's Sarcoma or as I like to call it my game. I think of it as a game because all games have a solution, and my solution is my treatment, but unfortunately they also have ups and downs. I am prepared to come back from these downs as I'm a very competitive person. I attribute all of the success in my life to my competitive nature which is the quality I am most thankful to be given from God. 

Ewing's sarcoma is an extremely rare form of bone cancer that mostly effects children 10-20. It is caused by a chromosomal mutation that occurs during early development. So when I was born, I was destined to have this. It is so rare that only about 5 out of 1 million kids aged 15-19 which is the most common age to get this.

So how did this all come about? Back in October I began to notice a tight feeling in my right tricep/shoulder area. I didn't think much of it because I was lifting weights, and playing basketball and thought it was just a pulled muscle. I only noticed the tightness when I used my laptop with my crappy posture that I have been told about so many times haha.

In the winter like late December the pain was stopping me from lifting really heavy objects such as making a snowman, or lifting weights which is when I took a break from lifting. I began to ice the area and take Advil twice per day which helped a lot. I thought the pain was gone for a while, but I also wasn't doing much physical activity until February when I performed yoga in my stress management class and could do the poses as effectively in my right arm as my left arm. I also strained my arm one day when I pulled my backpack over. At this point I began to complain about this pain to my mom, and  I agreed to get it checked out after the semester as I was very busy with school. So the year finished and I topped my goal of a 3.7 cumulative GPA with a 3.8 GPA. I then scheduled an appointment to get my arm checked out by a local orthopedic surgeon. Going into my first appointment, I still didn't think anything was seriously wrong with me as the pain was extreme, and I could do pretty much anything I wanted to except lift weights and pull lawn mowers lol. So after the first appointment I had an MRI, and I returned to the doctor in 5 weeks, one week after my family's vacation to Ocean City. The doctor wasn't very sure what it was. He thought it could be a tumor, a hematoma, or something completely else. He sent me to an orthopedic oncologist at Geisinger. When I met the doctor in late July he ordered another MRI as the first one only covered about half of the mass. When I came back in 2 weeks, I was told that it was a true tumor that was 6.9 cm in diameter and it needed a needle biopsy to see if it was malignant or benign. It was about the shape and size of a mini hot dog. This began the most stressful month of my whole life. In early August I had the thing biopsied and got a phone call from the doctor at Geisinger. He presented to me the preliminary results, which stated that the mass was a malignant small round blue cell tumor, probably a synovial sarcoma or Ewing's sarcoma. This was devastating news to me because I knew sarcomas as a whole are extremely rare, and some of them are very hard to treat. In a few weeks due to errors at the hospital I finally found out what it was...Ewing's Sarcoma. I was so happy; not that I had cancer but that I didn't have Synovial Sarcoma. I also had my PET/CT scan to check whether the cancer spread. Fortunately for me it didn't and I thank God for that as with the size of the tumor and other factors it usually would have spread. It was a stage 3 Ewing's Sarcoma which is very treatable.

On July 29th I had my second opinion with the University of Pennsylvania. They agreed that it was Ewing's Sarcoma, and also everything else that my initial diagnosis stated with one exception. The doctors at U of P stated that the tumor began in the bone and grew outward, which changes the surgery significantly.  Originally the surgery was to remove one of my triceps heads, but with it starting in the bone, a portion of the bone will be needed to be removed, but that won't be for a while. I loved the doctors at University of Pennsylvania and decided to get my treatment there. My treatment began yesterday which I will write about in a separate blog post. 

Onto the treatment plan...It will be a long 9 month process with many ups and downs. It will be 3 months of intense chemo followed by surgery, and ending with more chemo. There are 5 drugs in the treatment in 2 week cycles. In the 'A' cycle, I get 3 of the drugs over a few hours, and  in the 'B' cycle, I  get 2 drugs over a 4 hour period 5 days in a row. This routine will repeat for 3 months.

Wow! this was a long post...Rest assured my future posts wont be this long haha. There might be typos as I didn't really care to proofread it, so no grammar police please, haha. 

In these next 9 months I know that I will change physically from the treatment, but that will be mostly temporary. More importantly I will come out as a changed person. I wont look at life the same was again and I hope by reading my story, you will take what you can from it.