For many of us 2020 has been a very hard year, but for my wife Kim, it has been overwhelming. In March one day after our Anniversary, and at the height of Covid 2020, I found Kim sitting at her computer staring at the screen saver. She had been there about an hour. I tried to talk to her but all she could give me was one-word answers. She did not know her name or where she was. Living in a rural area, I walked her to the car and rushed her to the nearest hospital. The next day she was fine, oriented, and ready to come home. They treated her for a stroke and after a couple of days sent her home with a referral. The referral was for six weeks later because the Neurology Department was closed due to the pandemic. Two weeks later she has another episode similar to the previous, and we found ourselves back in the emergency room but this time the Neurology Department (I wasn’t allowed to visit the hospital) diagnosed Kim with two large and growing masses in her frontal cortex and told her she needed immediate surgery. Three Days later Kim had her first craniotomy. The neurosurgeon originally dingoes that was lymphoma and felt it best to leave the second mass in and to treat it with standard radiation and chemo. About a week after Kim being home her face swelled up like a baseball from an infection. We went back to the hospital emergency room. At the same time, the pathology from the surgery came back and Stanford reported it as glioma multiform, a terminal diagnosis. Again, another craniotomy was performed to remove the second tumor which was still growing and they planned to send her to a nursing home in the middle of the pandemic for six weeks of treatment for the infection from the first surgery. Ultimately after much deliberation with the doctors, we came up with another plan and she came home to heal.
Eventually, Kim got through the infection, radiation, and chemo treatments of fighting this devastating disease. On July 31st, her standard MRI showed that cancer had returned in a third location. The surgeon was ready to perform yet another craniotomy. This time our Radiation Oncologist recommended that we seek a specialist, which we did. Ultimately, we landed at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California under the care of Dr. Orin Bloch. He and the Tumor Board (a multidiscipline panel) at the hospital determined the third mass was not cancer but nears from the earlier radiation. He was recommending NO SURGERY. We were thrilled!
Two days later, Kim had a seizure and I found her on the floor of our bedroom. She was rushed to our original hospital where they could not seem to get ahead of the seizures from Sunday to Thursday. During that time, she was placed into a coma to minimize damage to her brain. After raising my concerns with the hospital they agreed to medic Kim to UC Davis and into the care of Dr. Bloch. When she arrived in California, he was surprised to find her in such bad condition and not reacting to any seizure treatments. After some time on an EEG, they agreed that the new mass was causing these seizures and we agreed that another craniotomy was required, her third. On that Friday, Kim had another six-hour surgery. She has been in the ICU through the weekend and has made some significant recovery. At the time of this writing, she is awake, oriented, and getting stronger by the hour. The seizures have stopped, and the immediate danger is over. She is paralyzed on the left side; her arm and leg doesn't move so she has a long way to go to full recovery. Dr. Bloch still believes this was a neurotic mass and not cancer. The UC Davis Tumor Board will review her case again this Friday. Hopefully, her pathology will be back by then as well, so we will know fur sure.
If this is not cancer she will have many more months/years ahead.
For now, Kim will spend a few more days at UC Davis then, they will transfer her back to Nevada to a rehab center near our home to work on the paralysis. They do believe that her recovery will be a long road.
At this point, our bills are approaching $800k. We do have good health insurance and much of this will be paid by them, but there are many unforeseen and uncovered expenses now and in our future. We have this
GoFundMe page to keep her in the medical care she needs, cover travel expenses, co-payments, chemo, and home healthcare.
If you can support us with any amount, we would be very grateful. Please click here for more information and thank you in advance for your help and sharing this page.