Crazy hair and surgical tape halter tops are "in"

...lower girlie parts are "out". Surgery went really well yesterday. I went under at 7:30am and woke up around 11:30am with a new left boob, a revised right boob, and no more uterus, ovaries and cervix. Woot! Once in my room I had to launch into my role as my own patient advocate rather quickly when I learned I was not getting any iv pain medication (just vicodin which didn't work for me last time) and I was only being permitted to have ice chips for 24 hours! I called a meeting with the RN and the in charge nurse and explained what happened last June when my pain wasn't proactively controlled and they agreed to order that the nurse on duty is to come offer me pain meds (demerol by injection) every four hours rather than wait for me to ask for it (because by the time I would really need it, I'd be behind the pain and in trouble trying to get caught up like last summer). Ever since the meeting they've done a wonderful job tending to my pain med needs and I'm very grateful for that. So...if this post is rambling or in any way confusing, I blame the demerol. I went without food or beverage of any kind (only allowed ice chips and sips of water) from Monday night at 9:30pm til lunchtime today (Wednesday)! Not cool. Apparently they were starving me so that I wouldn't vomit even though I've assured them I had no nausea whatsoever. Thank God for my lovely friend, Jessica, who brought me some contraband - an organic blueberry smoothie, organic blueberries and some other goodies that I could slowly consume while waiting for the doctor to change my dietary orders so I could have a real meal. Thank you, Jessica!!!! My dietary needs had to be taken up with the doctor. When one of the residents came to talk to me about it he explained the main concern was that I'd get nauseated and vomit (my translation of that was that they didn't want to have to clean up the mess so it was easier for them to starve me). He advised that I shouldn't eat anything, including the beautiful organic blueberry smoothie that Jessica brought me. Since they were mainly concerned with me vomiting but not expecting any other gnarly side effects of consuming something I thanked him for his advice and proceeded to cautiously sip on the smoothie. Thankfully, I've never had any nausea or vomiting from anesthesia and this is my fourth surgery since June '09 (all performed here UCLA). The subject of the catheter came up and I explained that I was feeling pressure and the need to go to the bathroom. He told me to use the bed pan (by the way, sadly and hilariously funny is the fact that the bed pan is pink). I raised both hands and showed him how on one hand I'm tied to an iv tube and the other hand a pulse-ox cable and then lifted the blanket off my legs and showed him the compression garments and cables attached to both of my legs and asked him to instruct me on how exactly one should go about wiping their rear end while laying down and tied to all this stuff. He suddenly realized I was serious and not some little kid trying to get out of doing her homework. I seriously considered using the bed pan and I seriously resolved not to. I recommended he take the bed pan home with him and try it out so that he'll know how patients feel when faced with that as their only option for relief while tied to the hospital bed. He laughed, nervously, and admitted that really every doctor and nurse should be required to do that so they'll know how patients feel. I agree. Somehow I doubt that he'll follow through to find that out. Oh, and in addition to both arms and both legs being attached to tubing, I had a catheter attached to me too and that thing was really cramping my style this time. I tried to convince them to take it out last night but they wouldn't take it out til this morning. I really did not want to use the pink bed pan and was determined not to and thankfully I managed to avoid it. I was visited by several doctors today, including my favorite Dr.Crisera (plastic surgeon, aka Dr.McHotty, aka Dr.C) :) and we agreed I could/should spend one more night because they want to see to it that I can handle solid foods and once I get home Cooper will be all over me and wanting me to pick him up which I can not do for 2 weeks. Dr. Heaps (OB/GYN surgeon, aka Dr.H) came by shortly afterward to check on me and he too agreed I should stay the night and he told me that everything he removed appears to be benign PRAISE GOD! but that official pathology results weren't in just yet. I had barely any blood loss during surgery - he told Bob it equaled a tablespoon or less. I told Dr.H about how hungry I was and how I had no issues with the sips of the smoothie last night so he changed my orders so I could have a regular meal at dinner time. Once I heard that I started nibbling on the rest of the fruit Jessica left for me. Besides the two surgeons, I've been visited by two teams of residents assigned to my case. I forgot which team belonged to which division (plastics or gynecology) so one time that a team entered the room I asked them if they were here for the hooters or the hoo-ha. :) Now that I've finally had a meal (first full meal in 48 hours), I can say that it's been a good experience - nurses are on top of everything around the clock. I also just received the pain meds and my eyes are heavy and about to close (actually I think I dozed off halfway through composing this haha) so it's time to wrap up this update and get onto the very important business of sleep. :) Thank you for your prayers and positive thoughts! I am praising the Lord... for everything...including my crazy hair and surgical tape halter top! ;) Before surgery: After surgery: Love, Julie

The unveiling of the sisters (aka tatas)

First, let me extend my thanks again to all of you for your well wishes and prayers for a smooth and successful surgery and recovery. I KNOW your prayers go straight to God's ears and heart and I feel the shower of His blessings every single day. Every day! I'm so incredibly grateful to Him, and to you for your thoughtfulness and generosity. I have been doing GREAT! The recovery has been a breeze compared with the big surgery during the summer and what a relief that has been! I only had to take the pain medication for 3-4 days and I'm sure I didn't need them that long but I was nervous about stopping and finding myself "behind the pain" (after what happened at the hospital when one nurse delayed my meds on day 2 or 3) so I took them just in case and just took less and less each day. The only time I've felt any soreness at all is when I have broken the rules - reached for something over my head or forgot and picked Cooper up. Even when that has happened the effect has been minor and short-lived, thankfully. I have barely any swelling (a huge difference compared to last time). My only 'complaint' is the digestive trouble that comes with using pain medication - the cramping and...oh nevermind :). It's short-lived and totally bearable so I'm really not even complaining about that. Just mentioning it since it's there - but just about done with already anyway. It has been a huge help having my mom here - thank you, Mom!!! Cooper loves her so much (and so do I!) and he loves to sit at the dining room table next to her while she works on her computer. He sits and draws and plays with all her stuff - totally cute. Oh...right...the unveiling. Haha (silly chemo brain!) So, on Sunday I was allowed to take the bandages off and have a gander at the sisters, the tatas, the boobies. I was actually afraid to look because I've heard from some that it can be disappointing even when the results are good. It's hard to explain but it's sort of like when you go through anything difficult and there's one little morsel of a bonus (for lack of a better word) that you look to for fun or humor and you've talked it up and then suddenly you're faced with the reality that you may have talked it up too much and then you're suddenly disappointed not just in your own excitement about it but the actual thing itself. In the case of reconstructive surgery following breast cancer, I know from other survivors that it can go either way - it can be a moment of sheer bliss and relief or a moment of great sadness and loss. I guess how a person feels at the moment of the unveiling depends upon what their expectations were. I wasn't "attached" to my natural breasts so I didn't hesitate to instruct the surgeon to take them both from me - they failed me in life before when they were so heavy and big I could barely find attractive bras and when I had them reduced and later discovered that the surgery prevented me from breastfeeding my son and then of course when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Me and the boobs were not my "friends" so I was totally fine letting go of them. Getting a new set of breasts that would not require wearing a bra and would be the exact size of my choosing was a nice little "bonus" to this process and although I would have been fine to not have any at all (seriously), I guess I have been psyching myself up to look at the positive side of having a set of perky fake boobs (better clothing options, perky set for life, etc.)....so I guess I was expecting bliss and that was probably a mistake. That's probably why it's taken me so long to write about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not sad or angry about it, I'm just not as excited as I hoped I would be. Why? Well...only so much can be done in a single surgery. Not every 'issue' can be fixed and sometimes it needs to be incremental and that's the case with reconstructive surgery that involves the 'growing' and 'stretching' of skin. You see, it's not like a run of the mill boob job where you have your own original skin and nipples to tuck a squishy implant behind and voila you have perfectly symmetrical, perky and glamorous boobs. Yeah, not so much. I had ALL of my breast tissue removed in June - they had to actually cut into chest muscle and create pockets for the expanders and later implants to be set into and this causes a different look than the run of the mill boob job. I also lost a huge amount of skin from my original breasts and the expanders served to stretch/grow the remaining skin to make room for implants. Anyway, the result is that I have one side that's slightly bigger and positioned slightly differently than the other because of post-surgical settling and fluid retention (lymph drainage issue). Thankfully, these 'issues' are only noticeable when I'm nude and thankfully we're not living in a nudist colony. :)Dr.C did an excellent job but he had a lot to get done and it's hard to know how it will turn out until the swelling disappears and things settle and then he'll go back in and get more done when it's time to get some nipples (doesn't that sound so strange!? - get some nipples LOL). He warned me that there would be things that would need to be touched up along the way so I have no complaints about the way expectations were set with me - my issues are purely mine with regard the emotional buildup involved. By the way, Dr. C is such a wonderful person too - talent AND compassion is hard to come by both in a surgeon but this guy has it. I'm so glad I chose him. On the VERY plus and happy side - and this is BIG - the new implants are so much more comfortable than those expanders. So to all the ladies out there with expanders -- you will not feel icky forever. Those expanders were hard, expansive across the chest landscape, and made sleeping a challenge (for me it did). The new silicone implants I'm sporting are soft and lighter and I no longer feel like I have a chunk of steel stapled to my chest. As soon as I noticed THAT difference, I no longer cared about the temporary cosmetic issues that still linger. Another positive is that the overall shape is better and more normal looking which is a big relief because before I had to wear layers - usually a soft bra, tank top and shirt - to try to disguise the strange shape I had with the expanders. The only way I could think to describe it was that it looked/felt like I had little tree trunk stumps because of the bumpy appearance in part from the skin stretching process and results. This surgery included pulling and tucking to smooth and round out the appearance and I'm so glad about that because now I can wear a shirt without worrying about hiding my stumpy bumps. So, another milestone is behind me and that's really awesome. The next chapter, radiation treatment, begins next week. On Tuesday I go in for my radiation simulation and CT scan. The week after I begin daily radiation treatment, 5 days per week, for 7 weeks. I'm plugging along. I'm cherishing every day. I'm working on my relationship with God and with myself. I started my first ever Bible study group last night and I'm so happy to have made that important step to learning more about God's will for my life. I look forward to sharing more about that at a later time. With love and gratitude, Julie

Tissue expander - implant exchange surgery: Update

Surgery went great today. We arrived at 7:30 am at UCLA to get checked in. On our way down the hall to the surgical center we ran into Dr.C and chatted with him briefly. I asked him about his recent trip (conference at a resort I spent a couple weeks at for work a couple years ago) and he gave me the quick low-down and we had a good laugh about a warning I gave him before he went (bed bugs at the resort). Although it's not the kind of thing he nor I probably needed to cause him to think about me while he was on his trip, I was able to give him valuable advice on how not to bring those buggers home to his family and it gave us something to laugh about the last couple times I've seen him. And, I'm thinking it's always a good thing if you make your doctors smile and laugh when you see them - especially if you'll be under the knife with said doctors so I'm always looking for ways to keep him and my other doctors smiling and laughing. LOL

I got called back for surgery prep so off we went (right on schedule, too). Got into that fashionable gown, paper hat and booties, etc. Saw Dr.C again and he marked me up with that lovely purple surgical marker and I got him laughing again - so much that he had to stop marking me for a second to avoid making squiggly lines heehee. Then the anaesthesiologist arrived and I got him to use my port for the first series of iv meds which was GREAT because that meant I was asleep when they put the next iv in my arm (right arm, of course). He gave me a tube of numbing cream and some cool cream holding bandages to take home with me (bonus! esp since I've been using press n seal wrap to hold my cream in place all this time haha) since I'll have my port another year for ongoing blood draws and a iv-delivered drug I'll be getting monthly for a year (more about that later).

We reminded every team member about my left arm - NO BP, NO NEEDLES - and we put a big long piece of surgical tape on my left arm with big lettering of that message to ensure nobody tried to mess with it - mission accomplished. Just after the doc put the first series of drugs into the port iv, I closed my eyes briefly and said a simple prayer: "Dear God, I give it to you. You have my complete trust and faith. Thank you for blessing me in countless ways on this day and every day." I opened my eyes and resumed talking to Bob and quickly things started appearing fuzzy. I woke up, looked at the clock in front of me, which said 11:30am (PT) and turned to Bob and said something like "gosh, when are we getting this party started?" and he laughed and informed me it was all done. =) Sweet! No nausea from the aneasthesia - yay! (my chart showed that has never been an issue for me at any of my previous surgeries and prior to this surgery the the doc mentioned it and was impressed - I told him I'm totally an overachiever and that got him laughing haha) The surgery went well and they wrapped me up in a lovely gauze halter contraption - the same style I had after the bilateral mastectomy. I get to sport this lovely fashion statement until Sunday afternoon and that is when I'm allowed to take it off, look at my new tatas, and take a shower. As I sat there in recovery I thought about how my breast cancer sister warrior powwow (aka support group) is on Thursdays from 11-12:30 at UCLA just one floor beneath the surgical center. I was thinking I should ask them to just wheel me down there to say hello but I know that Bob would think I was cookoo so I didn't say anything. Besides, by the time they finally got us out of the surgical center it would have been too late - but I was hoping I'd run into the gals on the elevator as they wheeled me down to the parking garage. Unfortunately, I didn't see any of them.

I can ALREADY tell the difference with the pesky expanders gone. I just felt under my armpits and can't feel them (could before), and felt the top of my chest area just below where my port is and can't feel them bulging out (could before) - this is SO AWESOME! Those things (expanders) took up so much chest real estate before and were so uncomfortable, I'm so happy they're out! Woot!

I was home by 2pm PT and felt pretty good - tired and hungry, but not in any pain (due to drugs, I'm sure). I had some soup and crackers and green tea and went up to bed. Bob woke me at 4pm to give me my next pain pill and I went back to sleep and woke up around 7pm to find Bob downstairs hooking up my new wii system! Bob and mom got it for me for my birthday and it arrived today while we were at UCLA. How exciting!

I still feel good, pain meds on schedule to ensure that continues. Cooper seems to be doing OK with me not able to pick him up. I sit down and someone else picks him up and puts him in my lap (with a pillow against my chest to prevent him from pressing on or knocking my incision areas). At bed time we did that in his room on the rocking chair and then when it was time Bob picked him up and placed him in the crib and I tucked him in and he was OK with that, thankfully.

Day 2 following surgery is usually the toughest, in my experience, so tonight I'm getting all the things I'll need arranged next to my bed so I can stay in bed and rest. Hopefully it won't be too bad since they gave me a full pill bottle of pain meds. Dr.H recommended a supplement (Bromelaine) for me to start taking tomorrow to help reduce swelling so that will go down quickly and allow me to keep my radiation simulation appointment in 2 weeks.

Thank you, God, for holding me and keeping me safe and comfortable - for instilling brilliance, talent and compassion in every member of my surgical team - for blessing me with a wonderful mom and husband to help me through this here at home - for precious Cooper - and for all the many friends and family members who continue to support me through this journey. For this, and many many countless other blessings, I thank and praise Thee.

To my friends, family members, colleagues, and blog followers - thank you all for your prayers and positive thoughts. I KNOW it helped because I had an excellent surgery experience today. Thank you to the UCLA team that took such awesome care of me today, as usual. I love Dr.C and the surgical center nurses - they're truly the best in their field as far as I'm concerned and I'm so blessed to have them as my care team.

Love,

Julie

PS - Here I am, ready for surgery - no make up, no brow pencil (though they're coming back quickly haha) - I'm au naturale! :)

A great organization for people like me - you can help

Today I had my intake meeting at a local cancer support organization, WeSpark. I'm fortunate that this organization, which is privately funded solely through generous donations, has an office near to me. I took my mom along (she has to drive me since I'm not cleared for driving yet) and I'm glad I made her come inside because they have caregiver support groups and resources too - things we can actually do together while she is here visiting and helping out. I am amazed by this generous service and all they have to offer free of charge to cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers. If you are a blog follower that has wondered how you can help me and others like me, please consider donating to this organization or one like it near you. The sense of relief and comfort I felt going there today and knowing that I can participate in all these wonderful offerings they provide to help me through treatment and through this battle was so priceless today. Tomorrow is a BIG day. We will be at UCLA most of the day. First we'll meet with Dr.Glaspy - the head honcho of oncology, the guru of breast cancer, and the wizard of leading edge cancer research (or so I'm told haha). He will be directing my treatment plan. I'm excited and nervous. After Dr.Glaspy's meeting we head up to Plastics to visit Nurse Tammy who works for Dr. McHotty so she can look at my swelling to make sure it's "normal" and have her look at my remaining drain to be sure all is OK - we're not expecting this one to come out yet - not til end of the week - because it's still putting out more than the threshold amount of fluid -ick. After Plastics, we head over to the UCLA Familial Cancer Registry & Genetic Evaluation Program where my family's cancer history gets mapped out and documented and I give blood for the BRCA gene test to determine if I'm a carrier. If it turns out to be positive for either of the BRCA gene mutations which greatly increases a person's risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers, I will plan to have my ovaries and fallopian tubes surgically removed after my cancer treatment is completed. I already need to have 2-3 more surgeries for breast reconstruction over the next year, so I would plan to combine one of those surgeries with the modified hysterectomy to limit my "down time". If I don't have either of the two known gene mutations, I might have my ovaries removed anyway since ovarian cancer is very difficult to detect and spreads rapidly to organs nearby. But I digress... While at UCLA I also need to hunt down paperwork - an order for a brain MRI (to rule out anything there since the PET/CT doesn't look at the brain - which I did not know before), and my FMLA/disability paperwork that the surgeons are working on for me. Needless to say, it's going to be a looooonnnnggggg day. Wish us luck! :)

Cocktail hour in 6345

FINALLY! Cocktails! OK....maybe not the kind of carefree cocktails I'd LIKE to be having - you know, the kind you sip out of a fancy shaped glass while lounging on some sandy beach in a tropical locale - but this cocktail mix I just took is about as good as it gets from where I sit at this moment. Mine is a cocktail of muscle relaxers and percocet. It is believed that a good amount of the pain I'm having is from muscle spasms since my chest muscles were relocated during the surgery, but also because of nurse brutis' nonsense the other night - a painful combination of ouch ouch ouch that got old quickly. Thankfully, nurse brutis was alone in her mission to kill my spirit and make me feel like crap. All the others since her have been running around trying to make it better. Earlier this afternoon my plastic surgeon, Dr.Crisera, who is in charge of my care (since the reconstruction is a lengthy multi-step process that just began) came in and apologized profusely for what he heard had been going on this weekend with my pain. He asked for nurse Brutis' name so that he can follow up on that craziness (karma is a bitch, ain't it!?) :). By the way, Dr.Crisera is amazing (and adorable) so if you ever need reconstructive surgery in the L.A. area, he's your man. The cocktail is helping. We need to make sure I'm stabilized on the right dose of this cocktail before they send me home so they can be sure I'll be comfortable the next couple weeks before they start pumping up the new booby expanders and of course we need me to be comfortable in order to heal rapidly which is needed before I start chemo. So....I'm spending another night here. That's totally fine with me. Even though I'm woken every 4 hours for medication and vitals I'm getting more sleep here than I have in an entire year at home (no offense little Cooper pooper) and I really need the rest. Thankfully, Bob and my mom are doing a great job crib training my little guy at home so I have faith that night time will get better and better at home - meantime, I'm taking advantage of the screw up here and getting another night of rest with round the clock care. My blackberry kicked the bucket this morning and I spent all day trying to revive it - it's a good thing I'm a patient and not a doctor because poor mr.blackberry coded and expired in spite of my efforts. So now I have no cell phone access unless Bob is here (so, just during the day) - just email access via laptop. Then it took several hours of convincing the IT powers that be at work that it truly had seen its last day and needed to be replaced. A new one should be arriving at my house tomorrow. If you need to reach me while I'm still here - email me and I'll send you the # you can call me at here in my room. Cancer -- just because you're not hormone-receptive doesn't mean you have a free ticket to wreak havoc on my body - your boarding pass has been confiscated so beat it, jerk! Love, Julie PS - A few people have asked me about the sign above my head in my hospital room which reminds staff not to perform any procedures such as BP checks on my left arm. The reason for this is that now that I have 17 fewer lymph nodes on that side, I'm at risk for developing lymphedema which can be brought on by certain things and thus several precautions now must be taken, including not allowing injections, blood draws, or BP checks on my left side, among other steps that I'll be learning more about in my post-op education and therapy process.

Initial Diagnosis: Breast Cancer

So....it all began when a dear friend and colleague of mine told me just a few weeks ago that she had breast cancer. I was shocked and extremely upset by this news. I immediately started remembering what it was like to watch my late boyfriend, David, battle and ultimately be taken by cancer in 1998. It was a life changing experience for me to be involved in David's journey. It taught me that it's never too late to do or be what you want to be - no matter what your age or past - as long as you're committed to getting it done. You see, David had been so many things in his short life of 44 years - a sheriff, an attorney, a speed skater, an investment sales professional and executive, and much more. And he was excellent at every one of those roles. He had determination, optimism, passion, in spite of being told he had 4-6 months to live when he was first diagnosed. 2.5 years later he was still fighting. I loved him and it was heart breaking to see him go through what he went through for cancer treatment and to ultimately lose him. I knew I hadn't done a self exam in a while, largely because it has been difficult to figure out what feels "normal" since my breasts have changed so much over the past year and a half due to the pregnancy and breast feeding and post-pregnancy changes occurring from the rapid increase then decrease in hormones. Regardless, it was time to check things out again. I proceeded with the self exam, which always just seems so crazy to me since you don't really know what you're feeling that should or shouldn't be in there and with all the hormonal changes and different times of the cycle that change the density of the breasts, I never really trusted that my self-exams were useful. I felt something small in my right breast but then couldn't find it again when I tried. I decided it was too important to ignore it and called my doctor. He told me not to bother coming to see him and that he'd fax a diagnostic mammogram and sonogram order over to the local breast imaging center. My appointment was Wednesday, May 27, 2009. I arrived for the appointment feeling good, feeling optimistic. I still couldn't locate what I had felt so I was convinced it was probably one of those fibroids that come and go with the menstrual cycle. I figured that it was time for a baseline look anyway and to start having annual screenings. I actually have been asking my doctors to order a mammogram for me since my late twenties after I watched David suffer but every time I was told "You're too young....and since you have no family history of breast cancer it's not indicated." Okie dokie. My boobs were handled by the technician, placed into a plastic vice and smooshed every which way. It wasn't painful at all - just strange. Once the mammogram was done I was brought to the sonogram room where the tech asked me again to point to where it was I felt something. She didn't see anything there but decided to check the other side "just in case". Of course, looking back I now know it wasn't "just in case" - she saw something in the mammogram images. She moved the wand over my left breast firmly and said "did you feel that?" as she went over a bump. I did feel it - just then, but never before (and not since then either). She looked at the monitor which showed a big black blob. It looked gigantic. I said "what's that?", and she said "the radiologist is going to want to sample this." Oh lovely. She said she'd be right back and left the room to speak with the radiologist. When she returned she explained what a core needle biopsy was and how it would be done and asked if I wanted it that day or another day. I told her to get it done now. She left the room to contact my doctor's office to request the order so we could do it. I laid on the table for what felt like an eternity, thinking about all the possible things that this could be - giant fibroid (benign), infected milk duct (after all, breast feeding was a disaster for me), tumor (holy shit). Twenty minutes later a tall doctor entered the room with the technician and brashly stated "We're pretty worried about this." My heart sank and I was speechless. Now, if you know me fairly well you know that "speechless" generally is not a trait that describes me. It did then. He explained the procedure and all I could do was nod and say "OK" over and over. I was stunned and terrified. The procedure didn't hurt at all and it was fast. They gave me after care instructions and said that results would be sent to my doctor within 24-48 hours. Bob was away working so I was alone with Cooper that night. I couldn't sleep. I was short of breath (panic attack) for the entire night. I prayed and prayed and prayed that it was nothing to worry about. In the morning I held on to the fact that Bob would be home that night and I wouldn't be alone when the results would come back since they said Friday or Monday is when we'd get the results.. Thursday night, before Bob got home, my gynecologist called me. I had just been to the neighbor's house and the phone rang as I walked in the door with Cooper, my 11 month old son, in my arms as I grabbed the phone. "Hi Julie, It's Dr.N. I spoke with the pathologist and it's cancer." He went on to tell me what to do next - stop taking birth control pills, contact a surgeon (gave me a name and offered more names if needed), and told me it would be OK because he thinks we got it early though that was yet to be determined. Damnit is all I kept thinking and saying over and over once I hung up the phone. I walked right back out of the house and across the street to my neighbor's house so I wouldn't be alone with this information while waiting for Bob to get home. I kept thinking how can this be!? Holy shit! OMG! No! On Thursday, May 28, 2009, I was diagnosed with Ductal Invasive Carcinoma, negative for estrogen and progesterone receptors, HER2 status not yet known but pending. It was that same week, 11 years ago, that David lost his battle cancer. Unbelievable.