My cancer experience
Somewhere about 9 months ago, I woke up with a bump on my knee. It was literally overnight. I was playing roller hockey pretty often at the time and really didn’t think much of it because of how active I was. I thought I had twisted it or bumped it or something along those lines. The bump stayed there and gradually got bigger(not much) and more annoying over the course of time.
I finally went to a primary care doctor after a couple months and that was pretty much a waste of my time. They gave me some anti-inflammatory and antibiotic drugs to see if it would help. I was 100% sure that there was something going on inside there that these drugs would not help, but who the hell am I to argue?
After weeks of dealing with these inbreeds and not being able to get a referral to go see someone who knows more than the first doctors, I switched primary care to a reputable primary care chain of clinics. I had an MRI and was immediately sent to a sports medicine/orthopaedic guy nearby. He gathered from the report and films that it was some sort of fluid filled cyst and tried to drain it - no luck. I was sent to another orthopaedic guy nearby that was a specialist in bumps and stuff located near joints. He looked at it for less than 5 minutes and that set up my first appointment at Moffitt.
Moffitt’s first course of action was another MRI, with contrast this time. Contrast is something they put in your blood that makes anything vascular sort of ‘light up’ in an MRI. The bump on my knee lit up like a light bulb. This was not good news. They took a sample of the tissue with this sort of hole punch that it seems they use pretty often with a number of different types of tumors. Within the next half hour, I would hear the scariest thing I had ever heard in my entire life. I had cancer. They were not 100% certain that it was malignant, but everything that the tumor was doing and how it looked under a microscope was pointing towards malignancy.
I had a second surgical biopsy that took a bigger chunk of the tissue. This time, they went all the way down to the bone to see if it had effected it at all. More bad news. This set up the huge operation the following week.
The operation consisted of removing the bone(top front part of the tibia) that the tumor attached itself to and the tumor at the same time as to not ’spill’ any cancerous cells into the rest of my body. Easier said than done, but the pictures might help understand if you can stand to look at them. The bone and tendons sitting on the tables are not mine, that was the donor bone. They were ready to replace that much of my tibia/knee.
My condition is weaksauce compared to most of the people in this hospital and I’ve seen some of it with my own eyes. I feel sort of guilty for how healthy I feel after seeing what I have.
All I can do is thank everyone around me for the support and be thankful that it wasn’t worse. It’s gone now and the road to recovery has begun. The drugs are kind of fun, but the pain is not. The pain is pretty reassuring, though, because I know it could’ve been a lot worse and I know I’m still alive.
Pictures from my experience can be seen here, but be warned, they’re not pretty.