News Gazette Newspaper Article 5/25/08
Just this memorial day weekend I was in a article for my local newspaper. It was written by Brittany Abeijon. She is a student at the University of Illinois in Journalism. She did a semester long project of an article (about me) for her journalism class. She did a great job of writing it and her professor agreed. Also, the professor has helped to spread the word about her paper, which lead me to have an article in the News Gazette. So far I have received a lot of great comments and inspiration from other people. I hope to keep in contact with them. Just check out my most recent comments for their responses.
Well I warn you before you read this story. Keep you Kleenex close by, however I’m not sponsored by Kleenex. LOL. However, I do approve of the comments and statements in the article. The article can be found at this link http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2008/05/25/champaign_mans_cancer_battle_a_picture_of_positive_thinking
Or you can just read it below.
Champaign man’s cancer battle a picture of positive thinking
By Brittany Abeijon
Sunday, May 25, 2008 8:52 AM CDT
On the cold, gray tile floor in the middle of the hallway in Carle Clinic, Nick Schmidt lay on his left side with his back curved, his legs drawn up toward his stomach and his head bowed. Doctors wheeled patients in hospital beds past him. He couldn’t sit up in the waiting room chairs. It was the only way he could stand the pain.
“Are you OK?” asked a nurse with a confused look on her face.
“I’m fine, just don’t touch me,” Nick moaned.
To touch him would hurt, to move him would hurt. He was still irritated that he had been ripped away from his Thanksgiving vacation in San Diego because of stomach pangs and waves of nausea that appeared out of nowhere. He didn’t understand; he’d never been sick before.
He remembers thinking: Is it my appendix?
A young doctor eventually laid Nick down on a bed and pushed with cold fingers on his stomach where the pain began. Then he ordered a CT scan that would take a week to come back. He sent Nick home with pills to cure his nausea. To get through the work day back in Champaign, Nick sat on the floor and had to reach up to his computer to reach his accountant spreadsheets. To get through the night, he had to take showers.
Nick communicates through his Web site, above, from his Champaign home. The blog is called F.S.R., which stands for Faith. Success. Recovery. Friends presented him with a framed certificate, below. By Robert K. O’Daniell
“Your appendix looks fine,” the doctor finally told him the next week. “But we found some masses in your abdomen area. It’s probably cancer.”
Nick hesitated.
Cancer at 29 years old?
He wasn’t prepared for that one. But who could ever be?
Sometimes in movies when the characters are about to die, pictures from their lives flash before their eyes. That happened to Nick. In his mind, he saw his friends, nothing vivid, nothing solid, but a whirlwind of memories. He remembers seeing: kids, laughter and smiles, a wife, too, but only her smile, as if someone had zoomed in on a photograph, absent other details of her face.
“OK, what’s next?” he asked the doctor.
Nick asked a lot of questions, but the doctor had no answers. The doctor said he had never seen anything like this before. Nick had three tumors. But until a biopsy was done, the doctor couldn’t tell him what type of cancer it was.
Alone again in his car later, Nick began to cry, softly at first, then violently. Then he laughed, long and loud.
“I had the feeling that there was something good that was meant to happen in my future, and this was trying to hold me back,” he recalled.
He thought about a wife, making more money, securing a better job, and he started laughing again. On the seven-minute drive from Carle to his home in Champaign, he laughed all the way. Once home, he cried again.
His dad was eating lunch when he told him. Solemn-faced, his father rose and started walking around the kitchen. Unable to tell if his dad was crying, Nick struggled to hold back his tears. His dad hugged him.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” his dad said. “I lost my appetite.”
Two of Nick’s tumors are grapefruit-sized. The largest tumor is 6 by 6 inches and is pushing against his kidney, bladder and into his pelvis, a very difficult place to operate. The next largest is 5 inches and is by his liver. The smallest tumor is by his aorta, the largest artery in the human body.
He decided not to let himself worry. How do they know if it’s cancerous until they do a biopsy? he thought.
It took 2 1/2 weeks for the doctor to tell him his tumors were malignant.
Malignant? Have the tumors been living in me the whole time and it just hasn’t affected me before?
He knew he had to ask one more question.
“What chance do I have of surviving?” he asked in a voice that he believed did not sound like his own.
“More than 50 percent,” the doctor answered.
The doctor was calm. They spoke for two hours while Nick took notes. Bombarded with information, nurses, drugs and dire warnings about certain medications, he cried right there in the office.
The question didn’t hit him until the next day: If his chance of survival was “more than 50 percent,” was it 51 percent? Or 97 percent?
Nick had one week before he started chemo.
Telling his dad about the cancer had been hard, but now he had to tell his friends.
“How are you, Nick?” someone would ask.
“Well, I have cancer. How are you?”
The easiest way for Nick to inform his widely dispersed friends was by a mass e-mail. In the note, he wrote, “I’m perfectly fine! As you can see, I’m pretty positive about all this. No reason to get down in the dumps and I expect no one else to be in the dumps either.” He paraphrased the Bible, Isaiah 53:5: “I’m not going to die; I’m already healed. Plus, I’m in no pain now either.”
The verse was already highlighted in Nick’s Bible, and he came across it shortly after he was diagnosed. He never liked to highlight verses, but several years ago, just before she died, his mom made him highlight this one.
Nick vowed to chronicle his entire journey – from diagnosis to recovery – on his blog, www.schmult.com. He titled it F.S.R.: Faith. Success. Recovery. His first F.S.R. blog post read:
“I recently have been diagnosed with desmoplastic small cell tumor malignant cancer. I’m going to survive this and get on with my life and with the goals I want to accomplish. Faith, success and recovery are three words that are beneficial for me to get over this milestone in my life. Faith comes from God, friends and family. Success happens after the faith from God, friends and family. Recovery is a mixture of faith and success and the process of me adapting to my present and future successful life after cancer.”
Nick never likes describing himself as someone with “cancer.” He doesn’t like to use the word; he insists on calling it his “recovery process.” He believes that although he has not beaten cancer yet, he will.
“It’s not fair,” Nick’s long-time friend, Jason Piet, said angrily when he learned of Nick’s disease. Piet and Nick have been friends since their first semester of college at Eastern Illinois University and talk at least every other day. “The initial shock encourages people to get in touch with him, but that shock wears off. People stop contacting him, and it turns into a very lonely disease. They don’t know what to say or do.”
The most important thing Piet does is continue being a friend. He isn’t changing anything he’s ever done in the past. If he wants to call and shoot the breeze, he does. If he wants to complain about something to his best friend, he does.
“I don’t necessarily give him a solution, I just let him complain. He needs to vent sometimes. It’s important to show him that, ‘yeah, you have cancer, but you’re still my best friend.’”
Nick was most concerned about his job now that he had to work from home. He had to keep working to keep making money to afford the medical bills. He asked for only money at Christmas.
Each time Nick goes to the hospital for chemo, it costs $12,000 to $13,000 for four days. One chemo shot can cost $3,700, and he’s had at least six shots that expensive.
A hundred thousand dollars, maybe more. Nick estimates he has paid only about $2,000 so far out of pocket. Insurance has covered the rest, but he still worries about the cost of his treatment.
Nick thought he was in perfect health. He swam for four years on the Eastern Illinois team and kept up swimming for exercise out of college. He is still in good shape.
“You are going to make me sick,” he told the chemo doctors. “And I don’t like that.”
Chemotherapy is when chemical agents are used to shrink tumors. Man enters hospital, IV enters man’s arm, and chemicals enter man’s body in hopes of outwitting the resistant cells and shrinking the tumors. Nick went to the hospital at Indiana University in Indianapolis, a top cancer research center in the U.S. On his first day of chemotherapy, he entered the waiting room and was surrounded by old, sickly looking faces and bald heads.
I’m not like these people, he thought.
He felt like he caught a cold after the first chemo session in the hospital. When he blew his nose, the tissue was red with blood. When he coughed, blood came up.
Nick isn’t the only one going through this. His dad is, too. Nick lives with his dad, who takes him to the hospital, but doesn’t go in and hear and see everything. He gets scared. The image of his only son helpless in a hospital bed, needles sticking out of his arm and chemicals pumping into his body is one he cannot get used to, no matter how many chemo sessions Nick has endured.
After the second four-day session, Nick was allowed to do chemo at Carle. His dad cried a little when he found out Nick could get treatment in town.
“I’m glad you’re home, son,” he said, hugging him.
“All right, Dad, get away from me,” Nick said. “I don’t need you crying and getting me all sappy, or it’s going to make me cry.”
Nick’s recent blog post told of the progress from the chemo:
“Some of the tumors are still alive and some are dying. The doctor wishes the tumors would die faster, but they aren’t. So we are going back to a one-day outpatient treatment, then a five-day treatment. We are guessing that there are about four more total sessions left. But that is always subject to change. I’m doing fine.”
Nick holds things together but fears breaking down when seeing others grieve for him. During a visit from his aunt, he told her to leave the room if she cried. During a phone conversation with a childhood friend, he told her he’d hang up if she cried.
Nick usually tries to avoid people because his white blood cell counts are low, and he can get sick easily. It’s risky to go to crowded public places, but sometimes he gets so lonely, he takes the risk. Last weekend, he went to a bar. He didn’t drink, but he socialized. Some of his friends there hadn’t known about the cancer, and they fussed over him.
Nick appreciates the attention.
“I’ve always been the guy who has kept people together and up to date on what goes on in everyone’s lives. It’s nice to have friends reach out to me instead.”
His friends have each taken a designated week and bought seven presents, one for him to open each day. They’re small things – objects that trigger memories with certain friends and show their love. Each present contains a colored sticky note with an inspirational quote.
Day 1: a kickboard to swim with. “Success is never permanent and failure is never fatal.” – Mike Ditka
Day 3: a sudoku book. “The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.” – Vince Lombardi
Day 5: a 20-questions game. “I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.” – Dr. Jonas Salk
Nick is constantly surrounded by patients who are not near his age.
At the second chemo session, while lying between the stiff sheets of the hospital bed, a nurse entered and asked what Nick had and how he felt. Soft tissue sarcoma, he told her while an old man lying in the next bed over listened.
“It sounds like we have the same thing,” the old man said. “Doc says this is my last chance.”
“OK, I’m going to watch a movie now,” Nick said, desperately trying to get his mind off of what the old man had said.
“Didn’t mean to bother you.”
Nick thought: I don’t want to be here.
At 2 a.m. an army of nurses rushed in and swarmed the old man’s bed, as Nick was wheeled out to a private room. Nick asked the next day what had happened to the old man and learned that he was in critical condition.
“The moaning and talking negatively, I didn’t want to hear that. It gets you down.”
After two weeks of chemo, Nick began losing his hair. He couldn’t take showers. If he got his hair wet and ran his fingers through it, huge clumps would come out. Nurses had offered to shave his head, but because Nick’s dad hadn’t come with him that time, he didn’t want to scare his dad by coming back from the hospital with no hair.
He asked Robin, the woman who usually cuts his hair, to come to his house. Gobs of his hair got stuck in her blades and had to be blown out, twice. Nick turned red, then pale, then almost passed out. He had to interrupt the haircut to take a pill for nausea. His thick brown hair is gone now, but his clear blue eyes sparkle more beneath his hairless head.
So far, one of Nick’s tumors has shrunk half an inch.
“We’re going to beat it,” his dad said. “We’re going to work with it. It’s something you have to go through and do. It’s part of life, really.”
Nick does not feel helpless. Not yet, he says.
“There’s things in your life you can’t actually control, and you have to learn to adapt to it rather than try to deny it or change it. There’s nothing you can kind of change.”
Nick tries to stay positive at all times. He reads the Bible and prays. He prays for God to bless everyone he comes in contact with, and he prays for the health and wellness of his friends and family. He is religious, but he hasn’t been to church in almost two years. After his mom died, he didn’t go back. His illness has given him a new perspective.
“Why do you have a job if you don’t like it? Just quit,” he says. “If someone cuts you off driving and you yell at them, maybe they just didn’t see you. Why get mad when you have probably done the same thing? I think twice about reacting in those ways. I want to do a lot more things with my life than I did before, and I have to learn to be patient. I just want to get on with my life.”
After several months of chemotherapy, Nick’s doctors decided his tumors had shrunk enough to be removed, and they scheduled a surgery. They made an incision from Nick’s breast bone to 3 inches past his waistline, but when they opened him up they found the tumors had not shrunk as much as they had thought.
The doctors decided not to proceed with the surgery because the tumors were too attached to his organs and he could have potentially lost several organs – his bladder, rectum, or a kidney – and he would have been in a great deal more pain than before.
Although Nick admits he was disappointed his surgery was not successful, he still maintains a positive attitude.
“If they would have done the surgery, my life would be horrible right now,” Nick said. “The tumors were not life threatening before the surgery, and the doctors wanted to keep my life how it is now. I’m really happy they made that decision. I’m glad they didn’t take everything out.”
Nick has almost 50 staples to seal the incision and has to wait 10 days to have them removed.
Where do I go from here? he thought.
The doctors suggested Nick participate in a clinical trial in Ann Arbor, Mich., as the next step in his recovery process. A new procedure will be tried to stop his tumors from growing and shrink them further. Doctors tell him the method has produced great results.
At this point, Nick does not know very much about the clinical trial, like how long he will have to wait before it begins, how often he will have to receive treatments or how long he will have to stay at the hospital in Michigan.
Nick’s motto: Take it one day a time. Cliche? Yes, but practical.
“I have to do the chemo and go through the recovery process to kill off the tumors first. That is my mentality for every day. I’m waiting day by day, until it kills it off.”
