On Oct 28, 2012 10:28 PM eternalife wrote:
Hi oakisland,
It would be beneficial for others to hear about astrocytoma and Roger's story , if you want to post it. There is a need for everyone to know about brain cancer at every stage..not just the prevalent GBM...
With thanks,
Eternalife.. Thank you for asking. It is not a happy ending, so everybody keep in mind that each case is different, and I pray everyday that nobody gets hit as fast and hard with this as we did.
My Roger was a very healthy, happy, active person. Only 53 years old. As I think back, I starting noticing small changes in his personality (nothing major) in February of 2012. March and April he seemed a little depressed, he had started a new job and kept telling me he was just tired. We were planning our son's wedding , so I thought maybe that empy nest syndrome had something to do with it. Our son got married on May 5th. Several people at the reception noticed that Rog was not himself, when we left he actually tried to drive home with one leg out the car door. It was terrible. The next day he slept all day. Two days later I talked him into going to the Dr. He had a complete physical. He was fine except for a little high blood pressure. 5 days later he sat at our kitchen table for 4 hours to pay 2 bills. I thought he had a stroke and took him to the ER. 3 hours later we got the dx of Brain Cancer. He was admitted to the hospital had the biopsy and sent to Duke . His was a massive tumor on the right frontal lobe. Surgery was not an option. He never gave up, he never stopped believing that this was gonna go away, neither did I. He did radiation 5 days a week for 6 weeks..temador everyday, and avastin once every 2 weeks. I took a leave of absence from work and spent every minute with him..I watched him change from "my rock" to my little boy, and I would love to have the chance to do it all over again. Our life was like a box of chocolates, each day you didn't know what you were going to get. The night of his last radiation treatment he had a seizure that was what I thought at the time the most horrid thing I had ever witnessed. ( he had been on Keppra since his dx). We stayed in the hospital one night and came home. The next day we grilled steaks, during dinner he had another seizure and they just kept coming. We spent the last 5 days of his life in the hospital. It was not pretty. I research all the time trying to fiqure out how this happened. There is no logical explanation for astrocytoma. Just that it sucks.