| Prayers are needed for John King who was just diagnosed with cancer just before Thanksgiving. He has Breast Cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes in his right arm. They have also detected "hot spots" on several different scans/tests that indicate the cancer may have spread to his lungs and bones. At this time, they are too small to biopsy without puncturing his lungs, extreme bone pain, or cutting his lung open to get a tissue sample. So no one knows for absolutely sure. They are treating him as a Stage 4 cancer. For those of you that don’t know much about cancer, stage 4 is when the cancer has spread to other parts of the body.
He will be starting Chemotherapy on Tuesday, Jan 11, 2005. At this point, the Doctors are looking at the possibility of not being able to cure the cancer, that all they can do is to treat it to extend John's life for as long as possible. He will be getting 3 different drugs in addition to the pre-meds for a 3 ½ to 4 hour ordeal each time. Not to mention the possibility of taking more medications to treat side effects and to rebuild his white and red blood cells. Breast Cancer in men is very rare. According to the American Cancer Society reports that I have been engrossed in, in 2003, approximately only 1300 men were diagnosed in the US as apposed to roughly 212,000 women. We have been told that there are probably many more men out there that have it, they just don’t know they do, and it spreads to other parts and they don’t live long enough to find out. We have also been finding out that the large Breast Cancer research foundations that are out there don’t do anything for men with it. Their research and grants are for women only. Talk about sex discrimination! The American Breast Cancer Foundation has been an absolutely wonderful fountain of information for us. Since we have not had anyone really close to us experience this, we have no idea what to expect. They don’t discriminate! They have grants available that we qualify for. That has helped a lot. With no health insurance, and no paycheck when John is not at work, all of the Doctors, labs, clinics and Saint Clare Hospital have been very understanding. More than I would have imagined. We really need your prayers and GOOD thoughts now. The Chemotherapy is scheduled to go for at least 12 weeks, with a treatment every 3 weeks. Hopefully he will feel ok during all of this. We won’t know until next week. They say he is in great health otherwise, so the Oncologist is optimistic about it, but he did go over all of the side effects. Thank you in advance. Feel free to email us anytime at RACEKINGS@aol.com. Beth and John King |
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