Mike Judge vs Ewing's Sarcoma

I hope you all enjoyed Christmas! I know I did. It was a great time with my family. So for this post I'm going to discuss my three favorite gifts that I received this year. 1. The gift of keeping my arm. A couple weeks ago my mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas. For me the answer was simple; For the surgery to go well, and to have good function in my arm. I received both of these gifts this Christmas. I was blessed to have the plan for surgery change to allow for more function in my arm. Now I have a really good chance for full strength, and flexibility. I also was lucky to have such a good surgery team, and for everything about the surgery go well for me. Back in August when I was being diagnosed with all of this I wasn't sure if I would even be able to keep my arm , and now I'm sitting here typing a blog post getting ready for some rehab after I'm finished with this. It's really incredible! Thank You University of Penn. 2. Autographed Football ...

Yesterday was a long day. I had an appointment with my oncologist at 11:15 and my surgeon at 1:15. We left the house at 8, and didn't get back until 5. The appointments....went well. I got all of my questions answered, and I'm now much less nervous about everything. Let's break down where I stand with this cancer.  I now have all of the results of the scans I had before surgery. The last scan result I needed was the bone scan. Its Clean! No spreading of the cancer to my other bones. I asked my oncologist about the 2 mm nodule in my right lung. He's not worried about it at all. Since that was my first pure CT scan of my chest, the nodule could have been there my whole life. Also, 2 mm is the smallest size a CT scan can pick up. In other words...if you were to have 10 CT scans of your chest, not all of them would pick up the nodule. If my oncologist isn't worried about it, then neither am I. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but after surgery my hemoglob...

It's been exactly one week since my last post, and what have I done in this time...not much. I have been sleeping a lot, and when I say a lot I mean it. Like I get around 10 hours every night plus a few naps totaling around 3-4 hours a day. I've been eating well, and doing my exercises whenever I'm up and awake. Even though I don't feel like I'm doing much; I really am doing a lot. I'm recovering. I saw the biggest improvement in my arm yesterday from the day before yesterday. The swelling in my arm went down a lot giving me more flexibility in my elbow. I also didn't take any Dilaudid yesterday, just some Advil. The pain I felt didn't warrant the hardcore painkillers. I did take it this morning, but laying still all night sleeping can do that. I'm improving with all of the exercises except the external rotations. Not making any progress with that one. I'm not really using the sling anymore, not even when I go to sleep. The incision looks good as...

Before I dive into probably my longest post yet I just want to thank everyone for their support and prayers. I really am blessed to have this. It really makes a difference as you already know with the success of my surgery. The prayers have been answered.  Thank you everyone! Alright I'm going to try to keep this as short as I can, but at the same time try to get all of the main events that occurred throughout the week for me. I'm starting this right now at 7 pm Friday night. Let's see if I can get this done in one shot since my arm is pretty sore. Lots of pictures in here. Monday: Made our trip down to Philadelphia, and stayed in a hotel that was only one mile away from the hospital. This was really nice on surgery day allowing us to get more sleep and be less stressed on an already stressful day. Not much really happened this day other than getting down to Philly, and enjoying the hotel which I did greatly. There was a pool, and hot tub in the hotel so I got rid of my ...

Just wanted to let everyone know that surgery went well. We arrived at the hospital at 5:30 am. Surgery started at 9:05am. It lasted almost 6 hours. He was taken to the recovery room at 2:45 pm. The surgeon came to see us and informed us that it went well. Michael had healthy margins around the tumor. This means that the cancer didn't go any where else in the arm. This meant that the surgical team didn't need to take as much tissue/muscle as they had originally thought. The other good news was that the bone wasn't as involved with the cancer either. The surgeon had said it was "weird". The bone  was actually speckled. I usually looks more discolored from the cancer. They did have to remove one of his tricep muscles. This means that he will be a little weaker to start with. If you know Mike like I do he won't be hitting the weights too soon. Joel and I were just up to see him in the recovery room. He wanted me to video him but I didn't have the heart to do ...

This Tuesday is going to be a really big day for me. It's my surgery day to get Jimmy out. With the completion of the surgery it also puts me over the halfway point of my cancer treatment since I already had three chemo cycles, and still have three to go after surgery. It's really amazing to see how far I've come with this. I mean for a large portion of my freshman year of college I had no idea what was causing my arm to hurt, and I hoped it would get better. But nothing did, it just got worse eventually leading me to get it checked on. Soon after came the cancer diagnosis. And now after receiving three months of chemotherapy I'm finally getting what brought me here; my arm fixed . It wasn't the path that I expected to take to get my arm healed, but it's going to be worth it. After I rehab this arm, and get it to full strength after surgery it's going to be amazing. It's going to be the best my arm has felt in a year and a half! My arm is going to help m...

Yes, I'm going to dedicate this blog post to chicken wings, but I'm also going to mention some things that I failed to mention in earlier posts. I love chicken wings, and with my cancer treatment I had to limit the amount of spicy stuff because of mouth sores. But I didn't hold back yesterday, with this big break my mouth is completely healed now. I spent like 5 minutes the other day just feeling around in my mouth with my tongue because I have no life. But seriously, with the chemo, my gums and other parts in my mouth were swollen limiting the movement of my tongue. It was really annoying, but I got used to it. But back to the wings....my mouth isn't even sore today after all of the wings I ate yesterday. Some background on this place. Back in July, actually about two weeks before I found out I had a parasite in my body who would be later called Jimmy, my aunt Diane, and Uncle Paul told me about this awesome restaurant in Stroudsburg called Big Daddy's. They told...