Our Story

The scariest day of our lives is here.  Anthony has to undergo surgery to get his tumor removed.  We have a team of two surgeons who will be working on him today.  One surgeon will be removing the tumor in his jaw and the other surgeon will be reconstructing Anthony’s face back up.  They said the surgery should take all day long. 

Hair loss is a common side effect of chemotherapy.

Hair usually begins falling out two to four weeks after you start treatment. With Anthony he started to notice accumulations of loose hair on his pillow.  His scalp started to feel tender and the hair follicles were poking his scalp and it was hurting him.

Fevers during chemotherapy treatment, it’s a medical emergency. Fever may be the only sign that you have an infection, and an infection during chemotherapy can be life-threatening.

Today is a busy day.  Anthony needs to get a PICC line installed and starts his first day of Chemotherapy (Chemo). 

This is our finial test that is needed before they can diagnose and start treatment for Anthony. PET stands for positron emission tomography. The PET scan uses a mildly radioactive drug that is injected into him.  The cancer cells are drawn to this radioactive drug and it will light up the areas where there are cancer cells present.

A bone marrow biopsy removes a small amount of bone and a small amount of fluid and cells from inside the bone (bone marrow).  A bone marrow aspiration removes only the marrow. The doctor wanted to find out if cancer has spread to the bone marrow.  After this they will only need to perform one more test before we can learn about the full diagnosis and treatment they have planned.

The doctor ordered a CT Scan so they can better identify the mass and also to see if they can identify other areas where the cancer may show up.

So the news keeps on getting worse and our fears are now a reality.  We have gone from a swollen gland, to him having a mass but it can either be benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous), and today we found out that it is a malignant (cancerous) tumor and Anthony will be fighting to stay alive.  From the Biopsy they could not determine the specimen of the cancer and has classified it as an Undifferentiated Sarcoma. 

In December 2019 I noticed Anthony's left cheek was swollen, you can kind of see the above picture.  So I made and appointment with his doctor to get it checked out. The Doctor didn't think much of it and diagnose it has a swollen gland inside of cheek.  He proscribed some antibiotics and said it should be gone within a week.