Stage 4 cancer fighting father running out of time

This is all new to me so sorry about the book, I feel like I should expose my whole story vs just giving bits and pieces since I was convinced by others to give it a shot.

Hello, I would like to introduce myself, my name is Brian and I am and have always been quite the auto enthusiast. jeez, it consumes my life so much that my 4-year-old son is quickly becoming quite the little gearhead already!

I am a 34-year-old married father of two, a wonderful son named Aiden who is just over 4 and my little princess Arianna who was born just a few days after I was diagnosed with cancer.

In August 2021 I was diagnosed with stage 4 advanced Thymic Carcinoma which is a very rare type of cancer that affects less than 400 people in the US…. Yearly…. (Just the luck I have had my whole life)

At that point I had a very large mass in the center of my chest that was actually pushing against my esophagus which is and was the only “side effect” I really had that something was wrong inside me. I also had bone Mets that spread throughout my body in the following locations:

My right femur had a small tumor on top where it meets my hip.

My L5 vertebrae has substantial damage to the right side that causes all kinds of lower right leg pain.

My L4 vertebrae is in the same situation however the pain is located in the knee area for this set of nerves.

My L3 vertebrae is you guessed it, in the same condition however the pain occurs between my hip and top of my right knee.

My T4 vertebrae has some sort of damage that causes a fairly consistent pain down my right arm that absolutely NO doctor that has reviewed my case can find a reason for….

My C7 vertebrae was the absolute scariest since that tumor was beginning to wrap itself around my spinal cord which would have turned me into a vegetable if it wasn’t caught when it was….

I have a small 1CM X 1CM tumor that is attached to the right side of my skull but fortunately it has been stable and not caused any issues!

After being diagnosed with all of that we began radiation treatment on my lower back (L3/4/5) which is the most amazing therapy I think ever invented, I went from not being able to walk to being able to walk and probably run after just 5 treatments over a five-day course!

From there we began Chemotherapy of etoposide and carboplatin which are probably some of the worst drugs available due to the toxicity.

Luckily for me my mentality has been fight no matter what it takes to make it through this situation, more on that later….

I was able to tolerate 6 cycles of that chemo regiment with some very heavy side effects where I was maybe out of bed for 5 minutes a day over a 2-week recovery period just to begin it all again the following week since its given over a 3-week cycle course.

From there I was in actually good shape, all of the bone Mets were shrinking and dying, the mass in my chest had shrank by about 70%, was dying and I felt better than I had felt in probably 2 to 3 years. From there we just did follow up scans every 3 months to monitor the tumors and Immunotherapy every 3 weeks to try and “Reprogram” my immune system to find and kill cancer on its own.

This treatment option lasted from January 2022 until Father’s Day 2022 when within the few days leading up to it I kept feeling worse and worse. Well I ended up going into the ER in excruciating lower back pain just before Father’s Day and was admitted for 4 days so we could get my pain management under control and get some scans to see what was happening.

We found that my L4 and L5 were regressing and putting pressure on the nerves running down my right leg. After this we started radiation immediately. After 10 days of this we were done and I was back to feeling “normal” again.

After this fiasco we ordered new scans of my whole body to see what was happening, what we found was “expected” and there was new growth to all of the “known” sites that have existed all along as well as having a small spot on my liver now. Since we knew the carbo/etoposide worked well before we began on that almost immediately with the plans of running 3 cycles over a 9-week period then rescanning to see the results…

Well after a stressful 9 weeks we scanned and the result were not good, these scans showed that not only were things growing but we were also spreading now and there were new locations in my right adrenal gland and my pancreas now has a decent sized 4CM X 4CM tumor growing. (Not so cool fact: pancreatic cancer is not good at all and there is not really anything that can be done for it which really sucks)

This proved that the chemo that worked before was not a viable option anymore and was not helping. We stopped chemo and went back to the drawing board, as far as treatment options there are only so many drugs that are known to work with certain cancers,

This now brings us to just before Christmas 2022 and beginning to feel pretty junky most of the time. Since we knew the old treatment was not working anymore we were now trying a different chemo drug, this drug was called Lurbinectedin and had a less than 30% chance of working but hey, I have to try everything I can to be here for my family! We planned to run 3 rounds of this over a 9-week cycle then scan to see the results. I made it through 2 rounds of this drug before the side effects became too much to tolerate on top of coming down with Pneumonia which is not good to have while being a cancer patient.

In mid-January my Medical team decided it was time for me to consider stepping back from working a full-time career and focus on my health. Oh yeah, I have managed to juggle working my full-time career as a travelling field service tech which I was able to stay busy 40-60 hours a week, Me working for a Phenomenal company I am able to take 2 months medical leave which I am out on now and then roll into short term disability for 6 months or however long I live.

On 2/13/23 I had my most recent scans, after 2 rounds of the other chemo we would have expected to see a slight shrinkage to the tumors or even them be stable meaning they haven’t grown but haven’t shrunken however that was not the case. My scans showed that the new spots in my soft tissue organs (right kidney, right adrenal gland, liver and pancreas have almost doubled in size over a 9-week period.

At this point it is a race against time, I have one chemo option that is left which we began on 2/27/23 which is called Paclitaxel and it carries about a 10% chance of working for me….

My first question to my medical team after this was “will my car come out of storage this spring to enjoy with my son”

My doctors seem to think that I should have about 6 months or so where I should feel fine and be able to do mostly what I want.

Which brings us from my past history until what I would like to happen.

After being diagnosed I decided I wanted to get back into having a summer car, at the time I had decided that a C5 Z06 was going to fit the ticket perfectly but I wasn’t so much on the fence of having a car seat in the front for my son to ride along. I ended up picking up a 2004 GTO and putting a little work into it to enjoy with the kid for the summer. We ended up at 413WHP with a set of reworked 799 heads, a BTR stage 3 N/A cam and a full exhaust.

I was actually in the middle of putting together a Nitrous express plate kit to run a 100-wet shot on this car when I ended up in the hospital on Father’s Day.

Before all of this happened there was a 2010 Camaro SS that came up for sale that I jokingly showed my son asking if he wanted us to have it. From the moment the kid saw the car he fell in love and I know I needed to do something to make it happen.

Fortunately, the car was owned by my best friend and I was able to make a sale on the GTO very quickly and secure the purchase of the Camaro.

The Camaro came to us as a 2010 1SS painted in near flawless insane orange metallic, the car was lightly modded with an ARH exhaust kit an intake and tuned locally to make around 450WHP. From here I added a set of GMPP mufflers (made by borla) a Rotofab intake as well as a Holley NOS plate system running their Mini 2 stage progressive controller. We had this tuned locally and made around 470WHP without spray and 587WHP on spray which I thought were fairly respectable.

Which brings me to the 2023 summer season, I have wanted to boost this car since I bought it, an LSA swap I think would be perfect and bring the car exactly where I want it however every time I get the money saved up medical bills get in the way. Fun fact: the immunotherapy I’m on costs 12,500.00 every 3 weeks. Luckily and very fortunately for me I’m only responsibly for 500.00 each treatment which still adds up…...

Money donated will go to paying medical bills off first and hopefully have some extra to complete an LSA swap.

But what happens to the car when something happens to you?

This has been discussed with my best friend and in the event of my death he will take possession of the Camaro and become the “curator” if you will for the next 14 to 16 years of storing and maintaining the car so that my son will obtain it when he is old enough. We both believe that he should take ownership of the car when he is old enough since it’s something we enjoy so much of together.

So, in conclusion this campaign is primarily to get caught up on medical bills and expenses and if it is possible finish up my project car so that when I am gone and my son is given this car in the future it will be just how I wanted him to have and enjoy it! Thank you, have a blessed day and thanks again for your time and consideration, I know this was not short….