Feeling better about AZ

Last night I knocked out about 58 miles in the park late-night. Its kind of nice riding in the park at night. Its dark. The city is lit all around you. There's very few people in the park. The city sounds quite and the air is cool. Its not often you get to feel "alone" in NYC, but riding at night gives you that feeling. Really the only other time is when its snowing at night during the winter. At that point, you have the park to yourself and the snow dampens all the ambient noise.

My legs felt a little "dead" this morning, but they rebounded quickly as the day wore on. I got in about 45 minutes in the pool and then came home and knocked out 9 miles in Brooklyn and over the Williamsburg Bridge.

All that is great, but what really made my day was getting the following email...

Greg finished up his last round of chemo on Sept. 18th. He's slowly getting back into running but said it's been harder than he expected, after four months of chemo he put on 25 lbs and lost most of the muscle he had, but at least it's over. Greg has also started working in the Brooklyn store again a few days each week.

The results from his follow up CT scan came back and there is still one enlarged abdominal lymph node remaining. The chemo was still very successful considering when he started there were two tumors in his lungs and five in his stomach. The next step now is surgery, because with one node remaining simply staying on surveillance isn't an option. The specific type of surgery that Greg needs is called an RPLND.

Greg has decided to make the trip to Indiana University to have Dr. Richard Foster perform the RPLND. He, along with a handful of other doctors at IU, practically wrote the book on TC treatment, and he does more RPLND's annually than any other surgeon in the world. When the survival rate for TC went from 5% to 90% in the '70s, it was due almost entirely to discoveries made by these IU docs.

The other reason he decided to go to IU is because they were willing to negotiate with his insurance company. Greg initially wanted to go to Sloan Medical Center in New York City. But with the high cost at Sloan (twice as much in some cases), the odds of approval by the insurance company there were pretty slim. Now he'll get the same level of care, if not higher, for a much better price. Our insurance company has agreed to work with IU, now it's just a matter of how much of it they'll cover, but even some is better than none.

The surgery is scheduled for Nov 5th and is usually followed by a 5 day hospital stay. The best possible outcome is that they find only scar tissue, not active cancer. That would put him on a 5 year surveillance plan. If all goes well Greg should be back to work and feeling pretty good around January 1^st.

Greg asked me to express his thanks everyone for all of the fundraising efforts. The financial burden of his treatment for the past few months and the upcoming surgery has been removed and Greg has been able to focus entirely on getting better. Between the money raised and his health insurance, he will have to spend very little if anything out of pocket.

That brightened my day. I really couldn't have asked for anything better to be waiting in my inbox this morning.