Today is Father’s Day and I just want to give a big shout out to my dad, who’s been courageously fighting a tough battle since the start of the year.
On our annual family trip in early January, my dad started noticing his urine was of a dark yellow color. He didn’t pay too much attention about this symptom until we came back to Georgia, where a family friend also noted that his skin was more yellow than normal. After a visit to his primary care physician the next day and with his blood work results in hand, I was told to take my dad to the ER right away, as the numbers show abnormal malfunctions related to his liver.
We went to a regional hospital close to home in the suburb of Atlanta on an evening in late January, 2023. We stayed there for an MRI, CT scan, and more blood works, and some time past midnight a doctor came in to deliver the news that there is a tumor on my dad’s pancreas, which was about 3cm big, and they did not know whether it was malignant or benign. The tumor had pressed against the common bile duct, which blocked the blow of bile and thus increased the level of bilirubin in the body, causing jaundice (yellowing of the skin and eyes etc). They were planning more tests to conclusively determine the nature of the tumor. But the grim look on the doctor’s face said it all, they thought with very high probability (“95%” was the words of another GI doctor who stopped by later on) that this tumor is cancerous.
I had never paid much attention to the medical field, and so barely had an idea of what or where the pancreas is, or how serious a condition my dad was/is in. The ER doctor delivering the news had this death look on her face when she entered the room, and that was the first clue of things to come that I picked up. I then started reading about pancreatic cancer on the internet while my dad slept, and felt like the world was collapsing around me. Almost everything I read made it out to be an extremely tough uphill battle that he will face.
That next day my dad had a stent placed in his bile duct to help alleviate his jaundice symptom. The gastroenterologist performing this Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) procedure also attempted to make a couple of swipes (brushings) against the wall of the common bile duct to get samples for cancer confirmation, but the two results came back inconclusive (abnormal looking cells, but not positively identified as cancerous). The jaundice slowly went away in a few days, but he still had a much longer fight ahead of him. My dad was discharged at the beginning of February after spending more than a week in the local hospital.
Our primary care physician, who is also a family friend, recommended us to switch to a research university hospital in Atlanta for continuing care. We were able to meet with a surgeon at the university hospital specializing in the pancreas and livers in early February, and he said my dad’s pancreatic cancer is considered to be “borderline resectable”, e.g. it may not be operable as the cancer has involved blood vessels (“no negative margin” is the technical term), which makes surgery not advisable due to the possibility of still having remaining cancer cells in the body after the operation. His suggestion: go on chemotherapy as soon as possible (systemic treatment), and they would re-evaluate my dad’s candidacy for surgery (local treatment) afterwards, once they had seen how his tumor responded to the chemo treatment. With his help, we were referred to an oncologist and secured the first chemotherapy treatment on March 1st. Last Tuesday, my dad just had his 8th chemo treatment. Along the way, he had to deal with multiple runs to the emergency room, together with setbacks and inconveniences that one would only see in Korean TV dramas…. Yet he is still strong and fights on, where he is putting up quite a match to get to that point of being eligible for surgery.
Since my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I had been reading more about the subject in order to have a better understanding of his expected course of treatment. Everyday I am learning a bit more about his cancer treatment and the gastrointestinal field, and I will use this opportunity to broaden my knowledge in the area. I will try to semi-regularly write more about my dad and his fight, together with what I’ve learned along the way.
I am hopeful, and on this Father’s Day of 2023, I want to wish my dad the best of luck in his continuing battle with one of the toughest cancers out there!