00:38 My name is Steve. I was born in Minnesota but was raised in California for my entire life 01:31 I’m a mentor and a board member for Debbie’s Dream Foundation which brings me to the story of my stomach cancer journey 02:26 I was just in this phase of life that the world was so open I had all these opportunities I was fairly newly married for a couple years looking to have a child and mid to upper 30s at that time 02:57 We were in this phase where we thought nothing would really slow us down. The first time that I really felt that I had an issue looking back  I was on a company club trip with my ex-wife at the time we were on the Great Wall of China 03:19 I am in my 30s and I’m just out of breath. I’m weak 03:30 I grew up as an athlete and I just I just said I need to take a break I can’t make it up the wall here. I said, why don’t you guys go ahead. I’m just tired from the flight over to Beijing so they all go up they come back down they tell me about it they told me they got great pictures. Well that was the first sign of me vocalizing that I had an issue that was something I probably should have paid more attention to 04:43 So we have my daughter and when I was 36 or 37 years old right after she was born, a few months after she was born I started to feel symptoms of just discomfort in my abdomen area and I didn’t think it was much. I went to my primary care physician and the physician thought it was stress because I had a new baby in the house, I just switched to a new job after 14 years 05:19 And my doctor says you know you’re in your 30s you’ve got a lot going on it’s just stress well 05:24 They gave me some Protonix (Pantoprazole is used to treat certain stomach and esophagus problems (such as acid reflux)) that’s supposed to help with alleviating the reflux that I was having 05:47 I was having this pain that was that was just not going away. It was very sharp in my upper abdomen stomach area 06:03 I finally went to the emergency room 06:10 That emergency room visit started out with a chest scan then went or and then blood work the blood work showed that I was anemic then they did an endoscopy saw a mass and then the mass was a five centimeter mass at the junction of my stomach and and esophagus and right there they said I have cancer and I need to do something about it pretty quickly 06:33 That was in January of that was two weeks before my 38th birthday in January of 2008

06:54 I had had that pain off and on and it started to hurt more and more as it was a sharp pain that especially when I ate things like it was something would get stuck or it would hurt in one little area and being young and wild and free like I would have a glass of wine and that would soften the tissues there and it would allow me not to feel that pain as much and I would able to end up having food or whatever so I started to self-medicate with alcohol because that’s how food end up going down 07:53 But my weakness was constant so and that’s because I was anemic without really knowing how much how much how how anemic I was 08:21 There were three signs that I really should have paid attention to more clearly – One was the fatigue and I have a life and still do that is go go go go – It’s always on the go and so when I’m not going I feel like I just want to sit back and relax and do nothing so it was kind of all or nothing 08:40 So I kind of justified the fatigue as just I’m very very busy and then there was the sharp pain that was there and then the third which was hard for me to correlate to this was weight loss 08:57 I had gained weight while my wife was pregnant with her we would sit and eat pizza and eat sit around and I think I was at the highest weight that I had ever was so I was. I’m six foot one and I was up to about 182 or 184 pounds and that was the most I had ever weighed so after my daughter was born we’re only talking you know these these symptoms started six months after she was born well I started to lose weight and I’ve lost let’s just say 15 plus pounds so that weight loss is something I should have paid attention to 09:30 If you have unexplained weight loss which I thought I had explained weight loss but it really just happened pretty drastically that was another sign so those three things were were all symptoms that kind of I had a justification for all of them because of the stress and I was so young that they didn’t anticipate this to happen but really I should have paid more attention to those symptoms 10:23 Weight loss is a big contributing sign that people need to pay attention to 12:05 And so you find out you have cancer. Emotionally what are you thinking at the time how are you processing 12:19 In my in the back of my mind it was really what I’ll say it was an oh [ __ ] moment like it really was just “I have cancer” those words and at the time my ex-wife was flying back home so I had to relay the information via text or phone and and so I had several friends come and visit me in the hospital and the initial thought was that I had pancreatic cancer because my pancreas was swollen as well 13:42 I would say that I didn’t really break down until I finally had the plan and it was my birthday they wanted to do the surgery on my birthday which is January 30th 14:06 So they pushed it off and did it a week later so I was able to celebrate my birthday with a big group of friends we went bowling and went to a Mexican restaurant and had Tequila and you know it was just it was just one of these parties but I stood up in front of all my friends there’s probably 30 people that showed up and I broke down in tears and I said I’m scared I don’t know how this is going to go I’m thankful that you’re here with me. I appreciate your love and support but I’m really scared right now and that’s kind of the first time that I broke down about the whole thing really and I had this opportunity in public in front of all my friends 15:21 I had immense support from my friends. I had lost both my parents so I didn’t have parents so it was really that core group of people that that all took the time to come and be with me and they were all crying, I’m crying, they’re crying, everyone’s crying and support was coming from all over the country from my friends from college, from elementary school so I believe there is an incredible power in absorbing that kind of energy whatever it is and I pulled that energy into myself and and used it and I think it helped heal or helped defend off bad things that potentially could have made things worse 18:06 This surgery they wanted done pretty quickly and I had three separate opinions – the opinions were from different hospitals – some one wanted to do chemo and radiation first and then go to surgery the other two wanted to do surgery first and then chemo and radiation so I had to make a decision and the only reason I chose Stanford was because there was another uh hospital that had a similar protocol and my father and uncle both went to Stanford and got their masters and PhDs in electrical engineering there and I always wanted to go to Stanford but I could never get in so I said I’m going to Stanford and I’m going to go in through the hospital so it was my joke and my way of lightening things up 19:12 When you get to stage three it means it is spread  through the walls and spread and almost spread to different organs but not quite fully because mine was in the lymph nodes as well so I had I think 15 lymph nodes that they had to scrape out since they were impacted 19:37 So they they took it so they ended up taking out my entire stomach, my spleen, half my pancreas, a third of my esophagus, and so the surgery ended up being much more major than they initially planned but the the stage three part just means that it has it’s spread further and that they have to really go in aggressively and and make sure it doesn’t get through your lymphatic system and and go to other organs but it fortunately was only through the walls it and it wasn’t through to other organs 20:42 So I didn’t know how my eating would be impacted. I did have one individual that I had met through and we had started Gastric Cancer Foundation which was a separate foundation. I had met JP Gallagher and he had had the same surgeon the same oncologist the same age as me and I was just three months behind him so he was the only person who kind of gave me any insight into what I’d be experiencing but he only had a three-month runway ahead of me to give me and he seemed to be doing pretty well which was very promising except for the fact that he said the gas that he had was death defying. He said you know he was doing all right. You know, he showed me his scars and he was able to eat certain things and I used him as sort of my guiding light at first of course until he died later 22:27 So I woke up out of the surgery and I think it was a seven or eight hour surgery and I was in the ICU and I had a couple friends around with me that were in there, the few that were able to visit and I started to kind of lose consciousness go in and out of consciousness and the young nurse who’d only been working there for three months, she noticed something was very wrong so they brought in the doctor on call right then and that doctor said no this stuff is normal this gunk shooting out of his nose is normal, this feeling is normal and she said this is not normal so with with what I’m seeing with him he’s falling really fast so she called a Code Blue so I didn’t know what a Code Blue was at the time but clearly the room gets everyone goes out of the room; Code Blue blares over the microphone and all doctors come in and they reassess the situation and the assessment at the time was that I needed to be reopened and go back into another surgery so that’s what happened 23:56 So then they knock me out again and I went into surgery and I woke up about a week later 24:50 Then finally when I came out of it at the end I was strapped to the bed with my ankles and my arm and my head and I have a 24-hour nurse sitting next to me and I’m asking what’s going on and she asked, you’re not going to try to break out are you? And I go no because I had tried to tear everything out while I was unconscious I guess and so they unhooked me and said yeah you’ve been out for a week and you know they just had to reseal everything and we’re just hoping that that connection holds 25:59 If I can share one experience that was actually quite overwhelming in that next day or so I had a client that showed up and I was completely unprepared to see a client in the state that I was in. I just had come out. I had the nose tube. I was overwhelmed with what happened to me. I was like I don’t know what’s going on and this is an Indian gentleman and he comes in and he sees me and I look at him and it was like a piece of my outside life that had come in that I wasn’t prepared to see and I just started breaking down in tears 26:43 And he comes over me he doesn’t say a thing. He just comes over to me. He puts his hand on my forehead and holds it there and we just breathe and I just try to calm and I breathe and I just breathe and after a couple minutes he goes and he sits down and I look at him and I ask “What did you do, what did you do? And he goes, “Nothing, I just was there with you, present with you” and I felt like he just pulled away all that anxiety in a moment 27:36 Wow that is a beautiful moment of humanity and and I would reflect you know you had parents they weren’t there for you but in that moment you had a connection to something which was the human experience coming through in in a bit of divine so so thank you for sharing 28:12 So I was given copious amounts of pain meds and through the whole process and I had never been, whatever you want to call it, a pain pill popper. I never really took medications you know. Yes, I drink alcohol and but I did not medicate like that. Now I’m trying to get food in me, I’m prepping for chemo and radiation that is just around the corner and they have to wait till my incisions heal somewhat 28:46 They’d had to crack my ribs to get in so I had broken bones and to take everything out so the healing process took six weeks or so if not more just to ease the pain somewhat. But in that process i was also given whatever pain meds they wanted. I mean I had fentanyl, oxycontin, oxycodone, you know codeine, percocet. Whatever. I had it all and I didn’t realize how hard and how that whole addiction thing can be another problem in the whole journey of recovering from these deadly diseases 29:34 For the next four months I had to prep and try to gain as much weight as possible which was impossible before I started my chemo and chemo was back at Stanford 29:45 I was at home basically just trying to get through my days and nights in intense discomfort and go to Stanford one day a week hooked up to the IVs for five or six hours 30:01 I received chemotherapy oxaliplatin and 5-FU and then I would go home and take these huge horse pills called Xeloda (capecitabine) for rest of the week and I did that for maybe eight weeks and then in the middle of that we crossed over with starting radiation. Radiation was a whole other issue where you know I had to go locally and get into this chamber thing where I would lie down and get zapped once a day, five days a week for six to eight weeks. That was what took me down basically. I handled the chemo better than I handled the radiation but the nausea, and the weight loss – I got down to 95 pounds at this point so going from the surgery where I lost weight and now going through the chemo and the radiation now we’re talking six seven months later and I’m six one, and 95 pounds 31:07 I just couldn’t take much more so on my last day of radiation I went into the doctor crying and said I can do it but I don’t know how much more I can handle and he said we’re done. That’s it. He goes you made it 90% of the way but you made it way further than I thought you would make it so congratulations and so we ended it that day and that was that was my last radiation treatment and then I had about a month of dry heaving and recovery from just the burning inside – you know they burned me I guess so now I’ve got three tattoos little dots. I’m tattooed up with these you know these little dots where they radiated and now I’m trying to gain weight but I’m in such pain that my pain pill use is accelerating and that’s becoming the next problem in my life 32:32 I think what helped me through was I didn’t know how bad it was going to get. I didn’t have any research. I just kept on doing each step that I could take it and I’m like this is terrible, this is painful, oh my god this like when is this going to end? But then when it accumulates over months not just you know a couple days, I get to the point where like all right they’re still doing this. I cannot wait to pass out at night because I don’t want to be awake and waking up in the morning is the same cycle of pain and nausea and vomiting and not being able to eat. Each day was like I’m getting through my days but I don’t know like how many more of these days I can do and so it was it was literally just holding on for dear life and trying to look for the little bits of progress. You know I might look back and I wouldn’t see a difference from day to day but I might see you know a week ago I was dry heaving all day every day and now it’s just a couple times a day and I would look at that progress that I was making and that’s kind of what made me feel I was going in the right direction because I really only fell off and had a handful of step back moments through that recovery process but generally speaking if I looked at it it, there was improvement and that’s what kind of kept me going is I didn’t have those days where, you know like okay we’re back to step zero or we’re gonna have to redo chemo 34:03 Like if they would have said we’re gonna have to go back and redo chemo that would have been a much harder blow for me to handle but I was seeing that I was getting through these steps 34:13 We can deal with a lot of pain you know we really can. I do not like pain. I’m pretty weak when it comes to it 34:21 People say that I’m very strong when it comes to it but I cannot stand, I would do whatever possible to avoid it so I mean in my nausea periods I got my medical marijuana card and I ate edibles and that was the only thing that fixed me 35:16 I was getting whatever I wanted for the pain and its probably not a good thing when it comes to these things, especially opiates like oxycontin because I guess it’s heroin or like heroin. They got a hold of me; they got completely ahold of me and so much so that the detox off of that was almost worse than the other stuff that I went through 36:24 But the crazy thing is now knowing what I’ve been through I would go through it all over again to be where I am at now. So you know that moment where I didn’t want to live? You got to get through that moment because life is way better after that moment when you start seeing things in color and seeing things clearly 37:07 The addiction thing was almost harder than the other medical stuff because it’s like a choice. Like you know, I can choose or I cannot choose 37:17 When I was listening to the doctors about the surgeries I didn’t say well yes or no – I said whatever doctor, I’ll do whatever you say when it comes to recovery. That’s the attitude you have to take you have to say whatever it takes I’ll do it right 37:49 My addiction with the pills escalated for about a year and a quarter and it just it ended up at the end where I was taking about 20 oxycontins a day so it was about 400 milligrams which is a lot of oxycontin. You know probably a quarter of that would kill me right now but I knew the problem was bad because I was taking my monthly dose in two weeks and I was talking with my primary care physician that I want to get off and we had a plan to go down 10 a month but I couldn’t do it or at least I didn’t think I could at the time 38:28 My ex-wife was getting very upset at me too and saying I had a problem and she was gonna leave me and so it was all lining up that it was problematic so I cold turkeyed it and that’s not a good way to go about it especially when you’re going with such high doses because I was in the ER 48 hours later being wheeled in for sure thinking I’m dying right 39:12 I recovered and over the next month and I gained 25 pounds and I was able to get off, though it was a very very very hard recovery. I couldn’t get off my floor for the first week. It’s straight out of the movies, it was like I was sick, I was shaking, I was sweating 39:28 It was miserable miserable miserable like if I had anything just to shut the lights out and say it’s all over I would have done that. It was very hard so getting through that then I thought that getting back to my prior life because I wanted to be somewhat normal and normal in my eyes was not so skinny and going out socially, having drinks, and going out to events so I got back to drinking alcohol  thinking that I could handle drinking the alcohol. Well that was just a replacement for the pain meds. Little did I know that that you just substitute one for the other so the alcohol became so problematic that I was drinking way too much at home and I had a little daughter who was four or five years old and and it was just ridiculous what I was doing. I was killing myself when I had fought so hard to live 40:33 So I checked myself into my first of two rehabs and right before Christmas and I made it two weeks and then I felt great and I thought everything was okay and I asked the head of the place whether I need to be in here and he said no as long as you don’t drink you don’t need to be in here. So then I said I’m out of here so I left two weeks later thinking I’m fixed. I’ll have another drink over new year’s – well that was just back on that and it just got worse after that so on May 2nd, eight years ago, I begged my wife to take me into rehab again 41:09 She said screw you, we’re done – I’m over you – you’re going on your own 41:16 She ended up driving me there and that was our last day together as husband and wife because she filed for divorce and the custody paperwork while I was in that rehab for 30 days 41:44 I’m a success story from that rehab because I followed the rules 41:48 I did what I was supposed to do. I went to 200 AA meetings after I got out of that 30 days. I lived in sober living for six months which was embarrassing to me at the time but I put in a lot of work to get sober and now I’ve been sober for eight and a half years 45:11 With my ex-wife, when I got so sick and the odds were so grim, I think a wall just went up and she had to protect herself and the thought of me dying was just a very very very difficult thing. I think in her mind she was going to be a single mother of a little child and it was overwhelming so that took away the closeness and support I think for the two of us you know, our intimacy stopped we just became kind of two people cruising together instead of two partners in life with a child and so that was the beginning 45:54 In my book I said that I had the house, the car, the vacation home ,the child but I was as lonely as I’ve ever been in this house – like I didn’t have anything it was like my daughter and ex-wife would be together and I would be by myself in this house and I’m going what kind of life do I have? This was not a life so I didn’t know what she was going through at the time and I have more understanding after the fact of how hard it is to be a caregiver of someone and I would hate to see my current wife now go through anything near what I went through. What I went through it would be devastating so it’s a hard process but in all this process while I was in sober living I reconnected with my high school first and she and I dated for many years and got married and so she was my first and my last 46:49 I’m now remarried and I’m as happy as I’ve ever been. My daughter is 14 years old – she’s about to turn 15 next week and I’ve got to see her get to high school 47:00 I was never able to have children after because of all the chemo and radiation so I have a stepson that I was never able to have who is 15 years old and even though I do still have ongoing things that are byproducts of the surgeries that are causing challenges, I am as good as I’ve ever been being in my 50s and which is crazy to say 47:27 How does that happen after all this and so I have a connection with my children and my wife my ex-wife doesn’t hate me anymore like she used to. She just lives down the street and life is really good and I don’t know how I could have got here without going through what I did but I somehow kept a shine on all of this and that’s the key I think is kind of keeping a light and keeping a shine and just keeping that energy that is positive because it’s not all positive 47:58 I mean I share things that are it’s still tough 48:49 The book is called “Killer Graces” 48:53 That was named after my first racehorse that I used as inspiration to kind of enjoy life and killer graces just kind of fit in the line of all those killer things that I was hit with but ended up being graces in the end 49:22 What I would say is that we are stronger than we believe we are. We can handle more than we think we can. 49:30 Everyone has challenges out there. Your challenges are no less significant than someone else’s 49:37 I share my story because it happened to be a big one and if it can somehow help someone else get through whatever challenge they have. You need to not lose that light. I personally was in a period of my life where my future was dark. I couldn’t see anything going forward. I didn’t see a future and now I see colors, I see a future 50:04 I see these things and what’s really helped me is being able to give something and give a bit back to people because I get rewarded. My reward is talking to you today and and if anyone else sees this – that’s my reward in life you know 50:18 I’m doing this is because I get so many comments from people around the country. They say, you know, I can relate and no one else talked about that and you know what there’s a lot of stories like this out there and if I can just be one that can help someone get through their day and then pass it on to someone else you’d be amazed at what that gift of giving does for yourself, so I grow every day because of the feedback that I get and that’s what I would just want to finish with