Tag Archives: Cancer

Finally Some Good News

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I didn’t pick up on it ’till Saturday, and as it turns out I was the last one to realize. Did you pick up on it? Did you realize that at every step along the way, at any point where we’ve had to wait for results it has been the worst results possible!? I had no idea! Crap!

Lets think about this–Four months ago I had drop foot. Was it a pinched nerve? Nope, it was a tumor. Was it a simple tumor? Nope it was in the middle of my spinal cord. Need not worry though ’cause it’s just an encapsulated little guy in a nice little shell…except that it wasn’t! It had fingers spreading into my spinal cord and it could not be completely removed. But don’t worry ’cause it looks like a low grade benign tumor…or is it…And so it’s gone.

It was about five minutes before surgery when the nurse who was prepping me said “This must be scary, I hope that the results are good” My response was “What?! We already know what we’re working with here don’t we? I think that maybe I’ve been viewing all this through rose colored glasses!”

Some things never change. I like my rose colored glasses and I’m going to continue to wear them.

Today, however, we were given our very first piece of positive news: at this point the cancer has not spread or grown and does not exist anywhere else in my body! For a cancer that originates in the spine only a tiny percent of the time it was welcome news to know that its not in my brain. It was wonderful to know that the pieces of my tumor leftover from the surgery have not grown.

It feels nice to get some good news. Things can change at any moment (the nature of a glioblastoma cancer) but for now I just got my first piece of good medical news* and I’m going to take a deep breath, eat a large salad, and enjoy this moment.

 

*There’s been lots of good news along the way. Not always medical news, but definitely good news. I’ve written about it here, here, and I’d even suggest here.

How to Help

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I have been getting so many kind and sweet emails, Facebook messages, and texts asking how you can help. First off…thank you thank you thank you! Thank you for how you’ve already helped get us thus far, thank you for your willingness to both offer help and many of you who have not offered because your worried about trying to give us adequate space–both are a gift! As I keep saying over and over again: you all are amazing and we would not have the courage to move forward if it were not for the cloud of beautiful people that surround us.

I’m not speaking in hyperbole here when I say that receiving help has been the second hardest part only behind finding out I had cancer. I love helping people but I do not love being helped. I feel vulnerable and…well…helpless. And I don’t like that. So this post is difficult to write, but I know its important. For the sake of my wife, my kids, and myself I realize that I need to write this blog. Letting y’all help our family has been one of the most transformational experiences in my life (again, no hyperbole here) and I’m working hard on not letting my pride ruin it!

So after racking my brain for a bit here, if you’d like to be a part of helping our family, at this point in time here is how I best know you can do that:

  • Meals. I did not think that having meals brought to our house would be as big of a deal as it has been. But its been huge! By the time we get to dinner all of us are exhausted, stressed, and on edge so to have a meal prepared is an amazing gift. If you’d like to help, our wonderful friend Erika Albright has volunteered to coordinate this. Go through her ’cause she makes everything easier and keeps my clouded brain from messing up all the scheduling! Find her on my facebook friends (http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=688805708) or email her at: ealbright2k3 AT gmail DOT com
  • Texting. For the last two months we’ve been flying by the seat of our pants. We don’t very well know what we’re doing tomorrow or what we’ll be up for doing the day after that. Because of this iIt’s been the little surprise and random things that have brought some great joys. We’ve found that some of the greatest and most subtle gifts are from those who randomly text things like “can I grab you a coffee right now” or “can we get you anything tonight” or “do you want us to stop by at all today”. Text messages like this allow us to easily say “No, we’re good” or ” No, we want to just be alone right now” OR “yes, please, we’re dying for Krispe Kreme!” or “Please come play with my children before I kill them.” We don’t do scheduling well these days, but we do SOS texting quite effectively. (if you do not have my number and want it, email or facebook me. ryan@renovatus.com)
  • Finances. I have to be honest and say that we have absolutely no idea what lies ahead for us financially. There’s obviously going to be mounds of medical bills–but even beyond that we have two difficult realities that we’re working with. First off Jess is not working right now both because her job as a teacher limits Summer job opportunities and because of the nature of what we’re going through she does not really have time to work! Secondly, my job, my role, my calling is in starting a new Jesus movement here in the downtown Vancouver community. The Grassroots Conspiracy (as we’re calling it) is just taking root…and yet I do not know what lies ahead for me and therefore for my leadership of this movement. Financially speaking it was at this exact moment right now that I had been planning on solidifying Grassroots Conspiracy’s financial future through continued fundraising and possibly a part time job on Main Street…and now all this. We are beginning dialog with some respected people trying to figure out what all this looks like, but until then, and in response to people’s question regarding financial need–here are ways you can help financially:
    • Come to the July 14th fund raiser hosted at Pop Culture! It should be a blast and I think they’ve got some great music and stuff planned. It’s from 7-9 and all ages are welcome! (you can find its facebook page titled “Fundraiser for Ryan Woods!”)
    • Online gifts. Due to my role as a church planter (another way of saying we’re starting a Jesus movement) we’re able to receive both special gifts and reoccurring gifts through this website. It safe, secure, and fairly simple. http://su.pr/1VwRyQ Again, while we’re uncertain what, how, or if we should continue the fund raising process for our work, if you would like to be a part of getting us through this, this is one easy way.
    • Snail Mail. Similar to above, if you would like to send a check to help our family with medical expenses or whatever you can do so by sending PO Box 873575 Vancouver, WA 98687 written to “Renovatus” and marked for Ryan Woods.
    • Columbia Credit Union. Our local bank was kind enough to offer to setup a donation account. If you live in the ‘Couve and it is easier, you can go into any Columbia Credit Union and say my name or give them this number #444289 and donate directly into the setup account.
  • Garden. This one may seem a little out of left field…but I love my garden…and yet I’m kind of helpless to take care of it as I should! I tried and succeeded one day in watering my front and back garden areas only to realize that it about killed my body for the rest of the day. If you ever want to help water my garden in the morning, or help tie up my growing sugar snap peas, etc. I’d love the help! The best way would be the texting approach, to drop a text offering to come over and water would be easy and would allow me to say “yes please!” or “No, my mom is here and is taking care of it”…now if we could only get some sun up here in the NW!
  • So much more. I realize there is so much more I could write. I have tried to focus on the immediate practical needs–but at this point much of my time is spent in prayer, in research, in learning about clinical trials, in learning about what resources are available to us a part of the spinal cancer family, etc. Many of you are praying, many of you have shared information regarding research, and many of you know resources. I know there are many ways here that y’all can help and I’m wide open to receive it.

Thank you all for your love, your care, your support, and your prayer. You are making love more and more tangible in my life and I cannot say thank you enough.

Healing or Death…or something in-between

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Don’t be ashamed or disappointed in me, but I don’t understand or get prayer one bit. And this blog will not be one that details my confusion about prayer and how God works. That’s too big a topic, it’s too dear to my heart right now to spill out, and I wouldn’t even know where to start.

But I feel compelled to share that I don’t know if God will choose to heal me. I don’t. I believe he can. But I don’t know if he will.

Is this a lack of faith in my God? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

When I look at the life of Jesus I see a few very clear things about the nature and identity of God (’cause if we want to know about God we should look at Jesus right…I mean he is the most clear picture we have of how God thinks and acts). I see that Jesus had incredible compassion for people and that he hated to see people suffer. I see that when he encountered people who wanted healing he showed compassion and brought healing in one way or another (but rarely the same way twice). I see his compassion not just in bringing physical healing but in bringing holistic healing. He didn’t just get rid of the skin disease but he touched the untouchable person–that goes deeper than physical healing and begins to enter into the emotional realm. He didn’t just heal people physically but liberated oppressed people through his teaching and empowerment. And then clearly Jesus wasn’t just liberating people physically but inviting them into a new world of living that was free of fear of death because of a hope in resurrection and new life. Jesus was all about bringing life both here, now, and forever. I buy into that and therefore place hope in the fact that he can and wants to heal me from cancer.

BUT! (yes, I think there’s a but)

I also see that Jesus didn’t heal everybody. People died around Jesus, even his friends died. Not every cripple that lived in the time that Jesus walked around the Mediterranean was given the gift of walking. Even further, most every follower of Jesus that is considered a main character in the story not only died but was killed because they followed Jesus. They weren’t rescued from pain but entered into it because there was some larger story that they were invited into. Following Jesus actually allowed them to face death without fear. Why fear death if you know that death has no hold on you? Death plays a huge part in following Jesus–its a part of the story that can’t be ignored. I mean obviously even Jesus didn’t avoid it and hung next to a couple other guys that didn’t avoid it either (though I don’t think any of those three had cancer…though I can’t prove it!)

I’m not claiming to write a thesis here on Jesus and healing, nor am I going to make attempts at backing up every theological point I’m making (or not making). I’m not saying that I’m ready to die from cancer. I can say that I’m not ready to buy into any time frames that the statistics give me (though again, with my freakish cancer there aren’t actual specific statistics). And I can say that I want to believe and hope that I am ready for whatever my story brings me. And I can say that I want to believe that God can heal my broken body in an instant. But I also want to say that he can also work miracles in the story of my death. We all die, the question is how and to what end.

So please keep praying for my cancer to disappear, for a freakish miracle to happen that baffles every one of my oncologists, radiologists, surgeons, and pathologist. I think that would be a beautiful story and I want to tell it. But also know that part of my prayer is that God doesn’t just defeat the cancer but that he transcends it–which means that if it does take my life (and the surgeon says it will) the story that God can create will be bigger and better than I could have ever imagined. Life out of death–beauty instead of ashes–first are last–meek inherit the earth–God does stuff backwards and upside down both in death and life. That’s the story the Bible is constantly telling.

Lets tell an amazing story together.

Pathology Reports

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I’ve been a guinea pig in every aspect of my life over the last seven years. We kind of love it, we kind of gravitate towards it, we kind of thrive in it. We love the experimental element of it, we love being on the edge of something unknown, we grow tired of the already and has been…but that was all true until today. Today we found out that the type of cancer I have is one in a million. No wait, one in a few hundred million, maybe even more. Turns out virtually nobody has what I have. The Mayo Clinic is not done testing and retesting my tumor, they’ve even begun to look and re-look at my original MRI scans. They’ve invited other doctors to check and recheck it all out as well because its all so rare and unknown. They know what it is, it’s a level four astrocytoma called a glioblastoma. The only hang up is that they are not supposed to be in your spinal cord. Mine is. Spinal cord astrocytoma’s act and look differently than mine does and they therefore are quite baffled as to what to do with it.

Here’s what we know, we know that if it’s in your brain you have a six-month to five year life expectancy more or less. But mine is not in my brain. We know that this type of cancer spreads rapidly in the brain, that within three months it can spread and take over all of it. We know that people over the age of sixty are usually given less than a year to live, that children are given a 25% chance to pass five years…if its in your brain. We know that my cancer is in my spine…which changes everything. It means that there’s no precedence for how to treat it, no expectation for how it will move, no cases on which to base things. It is good news that there’s no signs that it’s in my brain right now and it gives hope that my life expectancy is longer than what they’re saying. We know that I’ve got chemo and radiation ahead of me, we know that I’ve got lots of tests ahead of me to discover if its growing and if its anywhere else in my body. And most importantly we know that we’re going to fight this hard. We know that God has been faithful thus far not in just bringing healing to my body but even and especially in transforming this shit into something beautiful and life changing. There is no reason to think or believe that things will be any different as we move forward. We know that we can count on all of you to continue to lift us up in prayer and to continually show us what tangible love looks like. We know that this sucks and that we were hoping for an easier journey but we’re up for whatever life throws at us (ok, we don’t have a choice, but with our faith, our friends, and our family beside us we can move forward with confidence!)

Ugh, this sucks, our hearts are breaking thinking of the potential long term effects of this are. Short term we’ve got lots of meetings with doctors, lots of tests to be done, chemo to start, radiation to begin, and who knows what else! Thank you all for getting us this far already. Here we go for round two.

What am I doing?

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I keep asking myself what I’m doing. Or better yet I keep questioning what should I be doing? Part of me desperately wants to get back to life as normal. And so I have someone drop me off at the coffee shop down the street where I’ve spent way too many hours over the last two years. It feels normal to see old friends and to even to continue making new ones. In an effort to get back to normal the wife and I went out on a double date, I’ve scheduled a meeting or two, and I’ve been trying to frantically catch up on coordinating our second annual Compassion Vancouver event. In an effort to feel normal I try to walk as much as possible, do housework, and play and interact with the kids as normally as I used to. In an effort to get back to normal Jess has scheduled girl time with a couple different lady friends (though there’s never enough time!), we’ve done a couple mini-grocery trips, and run occasional errands. Normal stuff. Everyday life stuff.

But things still aren’t normal. My body still hurts; my back still feels as though there are ropes tying my shoulder blades together. My right side is still paralyzed and doesn’t work right; it cramps and as the day goes on my whole body stiffens and gets difficult and painful to move. I can’t bathe myself, I can’t drive, and can barely make it down the stairs from my bedroom without help. While my extreme emotions are not as extreme as they were even a week ago I still find myself having a short fuse with my wife and children. As a matter of fact the level of emotion in our family swings as quickly and extremely as our kitchen’s swinging door. The children, while early on ecstatic to be back at home with mom and dad quickly realized that life was not normal. Dad can’t play on the floor with them, he can’t pick them up, he can’t put them in bed, and he doesn’t have the same energy level he once did. Jones also knows that dad might have cancer and the thought plagues him. Every day he asks me if the tumor is benign. The kids recognize how stressed mom is, they recognize the burden she’s carrying, and they act up and intensify in order to compensate—and mom and dad have little physical and emotional energy to respond appropriately. We kind of constantly feel like bad parents as we respond in ways contrary to our normal parenting preference or methods. Knowing your parenting badly is a heavy burden to carry isn’t it? So we try to create breaks by having the kids spend time with grandparents—it is a blessing to have grandparents in town! But the kids want to be with us, they should be with us, they need to be with us…and yet we continually ship them off…because things are not normal.

I want them to be normal. I want to better participate in our Sunday Arnada Community Meal, to be available on Monday nights to dream the Grassroots Conspiracy into further reality, and to live into the rhythms that have defined our Community House for the last eight months. But the energy comes in spurts, the kids freak out in flurries, and my mental capacity to process through my schedule still seems off.

At times things feel almost normal. I want things to be normal. But things are not normal. Things can’t be normal. Things can’t be normal because we still have not received results from the Mayo Clinic. They told us that we should hear in the next couple of days. Of course they told us that we should have heard five days ago and they told us we should have known twelve days ago. If we find out results today that that I start chemo on Wednesday (I am completely making this up) normal will be defined very differently! If we find out tomorrow that a miracle has happened and the cancer isn’t cancer then on Wednesday normal will be defined very differently. If we find out tomorrow that we’ve got to wait another week normal will be very…well…

Until we get that message—whatever it is—this is normal I guess.

Maybe in-betweens ARE normal. I don’t know. I don’t know what I should be doing in this in-between. I think I’m going to keep trying to be normal—keep trying to go to coffee—keep trying to walk normal—keep trying to ignore my back pain—keep trying to not be a jerk to my wife—keep trying to be emotionally and physically present for my children—keep trying to work—or maybe I’ll just rest, continue to write my thoughts down, journal, let my back heal, read some books, and wait. Maybe I’ll do it all…or maybe I’ll just blog about it!

Thank you all for listening. My blog started in December of 2005 as a joke and has turned into a cathartic exercise that keeps me sane. I think its working!