Eight years ago, on a hot, sunny July 9th afternoon, my wife, Sue, and I began the longest drive and journey of our entire lives. It was going to be an epic, tiring ride full of unexpected twists and turns, but it was a journey that we had to make.
Sue and I looked at each other lovingly in each other’s eyes, held hands, and said “I love you’’ to each other from the front seats of our SUV.
We were driving to Florida, baby!!
It was going to be 20 long, stiff hours driving from Michigan through the night through the boring, flat green corn fields of Ohio, the rolling hills of Kentucky, the twisting mountain roads in Tennessee, the hot, rust-colored terrain of Georgia, and finally the beautiful, sunny, palm-tree laden state of Florida. We were making the trek with our son, Justin, daughter, Liz, and her friend Kasey “Goobs’’ Gubelius.
Coincidentally, it’s also how the road for our future lives would be ever since my wife got diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer a day earlier on July 8th. We didn’t know what to expect. We were scared, yet confident, that God, our faith, and the miracles of modern-day medicine would get us through it and give us a long, healthy, happy life together.
I’m happy to report, we survived that road trip. There were twists and turns along the way, frustrating moments like when the VRBO owner only booked our family for 4 nights when we paid for – and were planning for — 6 nights at our resort in Orlando (I did give him a bad review!). There was also a lot of soul searching as we started that epic journey.
Our lives since then had so many parallels to that trip 8 years ago. A lot has changed, all for the best. We got new SUVs that we are driving. The old SUV with the driver named Cancer, is gone four years now and hopefully in a garbage dump somewhere in the universe.
I documented our journey through two previous articles that can be found here: Part 1 and Part 2. Please check out those articles before you read this update.
To sum up about 6,000 words into 2 paragraphs, here it goes:
Following our Florida trip, after 9 months of an intense treatment of chemo in 2015, the miracle breast cancer drugs Herceptin, perjata, and God, her aggressive form of breast cancer was depleted by 90%. She had maintenance treatments of Herceptin and perjata every 3 weeks and her cancer disappeared.
It reappeared in her brain as a 3 cm tumor – the size of a quarter – two years later. Dr. Daniel Fahim successfully removed it, she had a radiation procedure called gammaknife, which helped the remove any residual cancer cells that remained.
Now you’re caught up to our lives to the point of December 2017 — 7 months after Sue’s brain surgery.
It’s important to know that her breast cancer in July 2015 initially began as cancer “in situ’’ in her right breast just under the areola. It then spread to her lymph nodes, then to her liver, and spots on bones in her arms. There was a lot of it. The chemo, through the miracle of God, killed those cancer cells.
Never let your guard down, especially when you’re dealing with cancer. Travel, go on vacation, and wine tasting trips, to sporting events, concerts, and romantic weekend getaways. Live your life, but never let your guard down.
In March 2018, a year after being diagnosed with her brain tumor, Sue’s routine mammogram showed cancer “in situ’’ in the ducts of her right breast. There was no evidence of invasive, ductal carcinoma in the breast, according to her surgeon Dr. Shannon Bongers. At the time, she said to wait and see what happens. But my wife wanted her breast removed. She wanted it gone.
We waited 6 months until September when a new PET scan found “new calcifications’’ in her breast. Sue begged Dr. Bongers to remove her breast and she agreed.
On Oct. 11, 2018, I drove my wife to Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, MI, where she works and Dr. Bongers successfully performed the mastectomy of Sue’s right breast.
Dr. Shannon Bongers was a pioneer in breast cancer research. In 1994 she completed a residency in surgery and accepted a fellowship at Edinburgh Medical School In Scotland where she learned new surgical techniques for breast cancer. She got a degree in chemistry from UCLA in 1977 and was way ahead of her time.
Dr. Shannon Bongers died of cancer during the pandemic in October 2020. We thank you Dr. Bongers.
You saved my wife’s life by removing the cancer from her breast – an angel in person.
So many angels in person have contributed to helping my wife survive what we thought was a death sentence 8 years ago: Dr. Bongers, the brain surgeon Dr. Daniel Fahim, her oncologist Dr. Naveed Aslam, and our puppy Noah, given to us through a miracle of God in 2016 when we were going through a raging storm of uncertainty and despair.
Sue recovered well from the surgery and life went on as normal.
In fact, four days later, we went with our friends Tom Hutchens and Beth Carter to a fundraising event for Michigan State Republican Senator Pete Lucido. A month later for her birthday, we visited Traverse City in northern Michigan where we went wine tasting for two days. Then in March, we traveled to Budapest, Hungary, and had one of the craziest, best nights of our lives at a famous “Ruin Bar.’’ Two days after that we checked another city off our bucket list and vacationed for 5 days in one of the greatest cities in the world, Barcelona.
But our twisting, bumpy drive down the Florida cancer highway had one more hurdle.
In March 2019, after barely having time to recover from Barcelona – Sue had another brain MRI test. The results showed that a tiny tumor measuring 4.7 mm had come back in the back part of her brain. As was the case three years before, the tumor was also her breast cancer. Dr. Inga Grills, her radiation oncologist, said the protocol would be like the gammaknife procedure that Sue had in August 2017 — except this time, a linear accelerator would be used to zap away the tiny tumor with pinpoint accuracy.
We arrived in April at Beaumont Hospital’s Dearborn campus where Sue was fitted with a plastic mold for her face and head and the medical team pinpointed the exact spot that they would radiate. A week later, we arrived for the outpatient surgical procedure. They placed the plastic fitted mask over her head and face and singed away the tiny tumor. The treatment took 45 minutes and we left the hospital that night.
We went home and started living again, hoping and praying that Sue would be cancer free – again – for the fourth time. Two weeks later, we made a splash and started building our dream in-ground, heated, salt-water swimming pool.
Life was good again.
This has been a long ride for certain – so much so, that we go on our life daily as though my wife never had breast cancer. But then there are the visits every 6 weeks with her oncologist, Dr. Aslam. There are the 3-hour-long maintenance chemo treatments every 3 weeks at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. And starting now, she has a brain MRI done every 9 months, 2 PET scans a year, and 3 exams a year called a Multigated Acquisition Scan (or MUGA) that measures how hard her heart is pumping blood. She has these exams because the maintenance chemo can be hard on the heart.
For four years, every MRI and PET scan has shown the miracle that God performed – that there is no cancer anywhere in her body. Her MUGA exams show that her heart is pumping perfectly.
During one recent visit, Dr. Aslam estimated that Sue is a 1 in 10,000 case as a 5-plus-year survivor of stage 4 metastatic Her2+ breast cancer. He said that of all patients of his who had the same stage-4 diagnosis as Sue, she has lived the longest. No one has gone further than she has on Herceptin and Perjeta. This is unchartered territory for him.
He is so confident in her recovery, that he believes that she is cured, and he even had better news than that.
“Let’s see how things are going a year from now and if everything is good, we can consider giving you a break from the maintenance,’’ Aslam said. That sent a shiver of excitement down my wife’s spine. Giving the maintenance chemo a break or even stopping it? We thought we’d never hear those words.
Sue likes the idea, but she’s hesitant about it. One thought is that because it’s working, why change it up. But if she’s really cured? If she’s really cured of stage 4 metastatic breast cancer! Wow.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself Sue,’’ she said, talking to herself. “Things are going great, but I don’t want to get my hopes up about stopping Herceptin and Perjeta. It’s been working. It’s a pain in the ass going every three weeks for treatment, but it’s working.’’
In her journey of beating cancer, she’s had only a few lasting setbacks.
She can barely eat meat now. Prior to her having cancer, she could devour a steak, big, juicy burger, bacon – whatever the meat, she’d eat it. But since chemo that she had in 2015, she’s completely lost the appetite for meat.
Sue also has a drop foot on her right side, which was caused from the brain tumor removed in 2017. When she walks, she has difficulty lifting her foot, so she really must concentrate with each step. She won’t be running any races with me, but she can still exercise and do cardio sessions.
“If that’s all that’s happened to me out of all of this, I’d say I’ve done pretty damn good,’’ she said laughing recently
Her doctors think she was cured four years ago. And since then, we’ve lived our lives and taken several other trips from Michigan to Florida and left the driver named Cancer well behind.
We built our in-ground 16’ x 36’ dream pool in our back yard, celebrated our daughter’s 21st birthday in Las Vegas, visited Barcelona again, the beautiful city of Granada, Spain, and lived through the Covid pandemic. Sadly, we buried her 90-year-old mother Shirley, who had passed away from complications from Covid in 2020. The whole time, Sue continued going every three weeks to her maintenance treatments at the hospital and having her MRIs and PET scans.
But we got through the pandemic and continued traveling and living life. Last March, we knocked another location off the bucket list and vacationed in Florence, Italy, for a week. Plus, our daughter Liz is getting married next May to her fiancée Trevor. We’re so proud of her and excited to be the parents of the bride.
If you read my second article about Sue, you may recall at the end where I said we had planned to go to St. Lucia for our 10-year wedding anniversary, but because of her brain surgery in 2017, we changed our plans. I ended that article writing: “One day, St. Lucia, we’ll see you. My wife and I have a lot of life to live together.’’
In August 2022, Sue and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary on the island of St. Lucia and spent 8 glorious days at Sandal’s La Toc resort where a butler waited on us and helped make our vacation one of the best, most relaxing ever.
With her drop foot, together, we climbed an active volcano, went snorkeling in the ocean, went on sunset sailboat cruises, bathed in hot spring mineral baths, and ate some of the best food in paradise.
Her journey – and our journey together – continues. We look at life as a great adventure at the hands of God.
“I feel like I can finally start living life again without living treatment to treatment or test to test or doctor visit to doctor visit,’ Sue told me recently.
Sue is a living miracle after being diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer 8 years ago. Her doctors expected her to live 5 years. Beyond that was our goal and our prayer to God.
While Sue is a miracle in this journey, it doesn’t mean that other women diagnosed with breast cancer and similar diagnosis’ that she had can’t be healed in the same way and beat the odds.
I remember very early on when she was first diagnosed, Sue told Beaumont Hospitals radiologist Dr. Ann Swinford that she had read breast cancer is curable in 80% of cases. Dr. Swinford replied, “Even if it was 50% survival rate, why can’t you be that 50% who survives. That’s how you have to think.”
In the past 8 years — and especially in the past 4 years since doctors believe she has been cured — Sue has given advice and helped several women who have gotten diagnosed with breast cancer. So many women have got diagnosed in that time, probably because of such the awareness to get annual mammograms and exams.
For anyone undergoing breast cancer treatment, my wife Sue has these words for you:
“Do the things that you need for yourself like asking for help, resting, not feeling guilty asking for help, taking medication if you are aching, taking Xanax if you have anxiety, resting if you need it,” she said. “Visit integrative medicine (at your hospital) where you get oncology massages and acupuncture for neuropathy in your feet. Be the warrior, but take care of your own needs. Rest and relax, because this is when you need it most while you’re going through treatment.”
Take it from my wife, who has been through it all: Chemo, brain surgery, radiation, a mastectomy. She’s a modern day Job from the Old Testament of The Bible, who had to endure unmerited suffering to show his eternal faith in God. You must continue to have faith in God, even in adversity. Bad things like cancer happen to good people, like my wife, Sue, but in the midst of our storms, God is with us.
And God be with my wife, Sue, and I for many years. Grant us a full, loving life well into our 80s — or until our kids get tired of us in our old age!
