Letter: To all of our friends and neighbours on Gabriola Island
To all of our friends and neighbours on Gabriola Island, I’d like to thank you for all your good wishes and prayers over the last year since my son Stephen Symington was first diagnosed with cancer. It has been a difficult 13 months but there is now some good news to report. Since a successful bone marrow (autogolus stem cell) transplant in April 2013, Stephen has had a clear PET scan in late May which showed that there is no sign of active cancer in his body at this time. (Hurray!) He has just started a month of daily radiation treatment and will then have no further treatment. If his six-month scan is also clear, he will be considered to be well in remission. If all subsequent scans for the next five years are clear, this will be considered a “cure.” While all the treatments he has had for this cancer (and the many scans) put him at risk for other forms of cancer in the future, that is a bridge which we will cross if and when we have to. Meanwhile, he is well and back at the gym, still with his fantastic positive attitude, starting to grow some hair back (again) and working hard on his graphic novel and comics for Zombie Robot Comics. He should be able to go back to work at other jobs after about six months. At that time he will also go in to have all of his childhood immunizations redone because the chemo done for his bone marrow transplant destroyed all of his immunity along with his bone marrow.
The biggest thank you in the world has to go to chiropractor Chad Arsenault! By warning Stephen in March 2012, when he went to him for back pain, to go back to the doctor about some lumps that were checked out in December 2011, that they might be cancer, he literally saved Stephen’s life. We later found out that the back pain was caused by cancer starting to go into his bones – thus making his lymphoma Stage IV. If he hadn’t gone to Dr. Arsenault when he did, he might not be with us. If the doctor he saw in December had not made an error, or if he had gone back for another medical appointment at the end of 2011, it might have been caught at Stage I or II and been 98 per cent curable. Three months later the odds had gone down a lot. So thank you, thank you, thank you Dr. Arsenault.
I’d also like to thank my darling friend and neighbour Kate Reynolds who looked after my pets for over a year while I travelled back and forth to Vancouver to be with Stephen for his chemotherapy and many oncology appointments. How could anyone repay a favour like that? And to the many friends and family who helped out and contributed to Stephen’s living costs and my travel fund, another thank you. We consider ourselves extremely lucky for a lot of reasons. Living in a country where there is a medical plan to pay for life-saving treatments like a bone marrow transplant that would be out of our reach if we lived in the United States is also a great blessing.
It is very good news that Gabriola is getting another doctor this fall. I’m sure that if Stephen had been seen here on island where he grew up and is known, instead of in a busy walk-in clinic in Nanaimo, things could have been different. My advice to parents everywhere: No matter if your kid is strong and healthy, if he or she has hard lumps on the neck or groin or under the armpits, and is told to go away, they are just lymph nodes and a sign of fighting infection, don’t take it as gospel without going back right away or getting another opinion if they don’t go away. Especially if they are hard, they might not just be lymph nodes. And if the young person has a history of immune-related infections like Epstein Barr (Mono), they are even more at risk to develop lymphoma (Hodgkins or Non-Hodgkins) – a kind of cancer which can strike in the late teens and early 20s as well as in older patients. This year, on June 29, Stephen will be 26 years old. We are really going to be celebrating!
Sincerely,
~ Barbara Ebbeson