My Story: Why I Relay for Life

My husband Kollin will celebrate his 49th birthday on March 11. The month of March he will also celebrate a birthday of another kind: Twenty years of being cancer free!

In March of 1993, Kollin and I had only been married for 5 years and had a 3 year old son. We were living in Wisconsin and content with the life we were leading.  We had just made the decision to start trying to have another child. We had decided early on in our marriage that we wanted our children to be at least 4 years apart in age so that we would only have one in college at a time.

You know the old saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." He definitely had 'other' plans for us! Right around his 29th birthday, Kollin noticed a knot on his testicles. At first we both thought our son had caused it by accidently hitting daddy there and had caused some type of internal bruise that would quickly go away.

A couple of weeks after first noticing it, Kollin mentioned it to a friend of his that was a pharmacist. This friend told him that it could be cancer, gave him the name of an oncology urologist, and encouraged him to call as soon as possible. He called the doctor and they made the appointment for that Thursday. The doctor did the exam and looked at the xrays and told us he suspected it was testicular cancer. He ordered blood tests and an MRI and told us to come back the next day.

The next day, Friday, the doctor showed us the results of the blood work and the MRI and informed us that the tumor needed to be removed ASAP. They scheduled the surgery for the following Monday! We had from Friday to Monday to come to terms with what we had been told. My husband had just turned 29 years old and was facing his own mortality. I was not quite 29 and praying desperately to God that I would not become a widow before I was 30.  

Kollin's first surgery was an outpatient procedure that took about an hour. He went home that night and we waited for the pathology reports. Back in 1993, the HIPAA laws had not gone into effect yet, so on the day the results were to come back, I am the one that made the call to the doctor. He told me that Kollin's cancer could be any one of 5 different types of cells. If it was one type, then all they'd do is follow up with radiation and nothing more. However, if it was any of the other four types, then there would be more surgery and chemotherapy. Kollin had two of the other four types. One month almost to the day of his first surgery, he was back in the hospital for surgery number two. 

Kollin's second surgery took nine hours. They had to remove all the lymph nodes on the left side of his chest, because that is the next area the cancer usually attacks. When he was finally taken to ICU, I didn't recognize him. He had tubes and wires coming out of everywhere.  His fingers were swollen to the size of sausages. I kept wondering if I'd made the right decision to have him undergo this surgery when he had appeared so healthy before! Our son turned 4 on May 10th that year and the only thing he kept asking for was for Daddy to come home. He got his wish when Kollin was released on May 8. He had to stay in the hospital for a total of 10 days. 

The end of May, exactly two months after his cancer diagnosis, Kollin started chemotherapy. He had to do three rounds, which meant one week in the hospital followed by two weeks at home, then repeat. He started losing his hair on Father's Day. We shaved his head a couple of days later. Each time he'd go into the hospital, they'd take blood and do the tumor marker tests. The cancer numbers kept going up. Not the best news! On the third and final round, we finally got our miracle. The doctor came in with the news that the cancer was GONE. He had to finish out his final round of chemo, but we had gotten the news we had been praying for! 

We learned a lot that year. Cancer is not something I would wish on anyone, not even my enemy. But it brought us together as a couple in a way that most others will never know. We also learned that cancer is not an "old person's" disease. It can and DOES strike young people, too.

We learned that testicular cancer is actually a young man's disease. It mostly strikes young men between the ages of 15 and 40. Testicular cancer is the most curable of the cancers IF it's caught early. Unfortunately, because it effects so many boys in their teens, it isn't always caught until it's too late. Too many moms are losing their baby boys needlessly. We need to educate our boys about testicular cancer in the same manner we are educating our girls about breast cancer. We need to let them know it's not shameful to do self exams and alert them to the early warning signs.

For that reason, and in honor of my husband, I Relay. I know that the money I help raise for the American Cancer Society will go toward more education, as well as more research for not only testicular cancer, but ALL types of cancer.

I hope you will join me on June 8, at the Waukee High School track for the next American Cancer Society Relay For Life of Southern Dallas County IA. For more information on testicular cancer or any other type of cancer, please visit www.cancer.org.

To register for our Relay, please go to www.relayforlife.org/southerndallascountyia. If you have any questions about our Relay, please email me at relay4lifesdc@gmail.com.