Why Not Me?

I live in a world of "why not me?"

Where life's a gift and nothing's free

So I never thought "oh this can't be"

On the day it actually happened to me

Most people walk around with the thought of cancer in the background. They know it is out there, but it is not something they talk about every single day. Oncologists, on the other hand, deal with it every day. We know it is out there because every day it is in our office. Every day it is in our thoughts while making plans to kill it. Sometimes at night, it wakes us from sleep thinking of our patients and whether we have recommended the right plan. We see the people with cancer. They come from everywhere and anywhere, and can be anybody. Cancer doesn't care who you are, what you look like, how old or young you are, where you come from, how much money you make, or what you've done. Cells make mistakes and mistakes can be based on simple chance. Oncologists know this.

Most of my patients live in a word of "why me?" They want to know what caused it. I cannot give them an answer most of the time. There is no one single answer. Cancer happens because the body is imperfect. I know this. So when it happened to me, my thought was, "why not me?" One stressful day, January 6, 2025, I didn't look well in-between my second and third clinic patients. The nurse who told me I didn't look well told me that wanted to get a set of vital signs. My blood pressure was in the 240s over 120s, which is very high. I was taken to the emergency room.  This led to a workup for "secondary hypertension" since I had never had high blood pressure before. Part of this was a bunch of labs. These labs showed high cortisol levels. The high cortisol led to a scan. The scan showed a tumor on my adrenal gland that was highly suspicious for adrenocortical carcinoma.

The scan led me to call to my friend who removes tumors for a living. He knew someone who specializes in removing adrenal tumors. This led to a surgery on March 6th. This led to the entire tumor being removed robotically. Final pathology is still pending, but as rare as these cancers are, the classification system and prognosis of what I have is quite unknown. As pathologic classification goes, I do not have adrenocortical carcinoma. My tumor was more slow growing than that and this offers a lot of hope. My chance of seeing age 50 are likely better than 50% at 5 years (what ACC is), but unlike more common tumors, we just don't know.

All this time, I've been okay with this. I have moments where I'm scared. But most of the time, I'm ready to accept whatever God's will is.

Thanks for reading. I'll keep writing.

Dr. G