Drama or Drama Queens - A Bit About ACC

It's funny that while you don't have to, you know so little about cancer.  However when it strikes your immediate family, it opens up a whole new world you never really knew much about.  If you are lucky enough, your experience with cancer may be somebody you know of, but that sort of thing is not meant to happen to you.  Since the "Zanker World" and the "Cancer World" collided on the 4th of October we now know a bit more of what we are dealing with.

Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma, or ACC, is a rare form of cancer generally found starting in the saliva glands, but  can also originate in 38 other organs, glands or other places in the body.  Of a study done in America over a  10 year period, there were (round figures), 500,000 reportable cases of cancer of which ACC made up just over a 1,000.  It's is described as being initially slow and gradual in its growth, however once growing is insidious, aggressive in nature and relentless.  It does not respond to chemotherapy and when it returns it generally will reappear in the lungs.  It does not use the lymphatic system, but rather travels through the nervous system.  There is no other way of saying the outcome of treatment and what the reality of this cancer will be.  As much as you want to be positive and put on the rose coloured glasses, the black and white of it is grim. We are optimistic that it will not return in 3 to 5 years.  Unfortunately as the years go on, studies have shown the chance of it returning is greater than 60%.  This not to say that some people have gone on to live to a ripe old age.  Our intention is to be "those people".

So Drama or Drama Queens?  All I know is there is a very real possibility that I will not have a wife at my side and our 3 boys may not have a mother.  I know that is the case potentially for everybody, but it just seems to me that it is more than an unequal playing field for us right now.  So when people ask, "how are you going", I lie.  It's easier for me and them too I think because the reality is I am not fine and it is taking every part of me just to be in present, to not entertain the 'what if" scenarios, which at the moment are all consuming.  I am praying this feeling will ease and pass, but at the moment as Karen describes it, we have a ticking time bomb and we just don't know when and if it will go off.

So what now while we wait.....Philippians 4:8

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy -think about such things."