Here to Stay
The trouble startedwhen he saw blood in his urine right before he was about to go on the air as a 48-year-old news broadcaster in British Columbia.
“Looking back, I had other symptoms that I didn’t recognize,”Stephen Andrewrecalls. “One was losing weight, but I was on a new exercise regimen so I thought it was natural. And I did have some flank pain, but I put that down to standing incorrectly and a bad back.”
Optimism was in short supply the day he got the news—he had stage IV metastatic kidney cancer. Now, 13 years later, at age 61, he’s cancer-free and helps others face down the disease.
At the time of his diagnosis, Andrew had a grapefruit-size mass on his right kidney and a lesion on his lung. He had surgeries to remove the kidney tumor and to excise part of his lung. But weeks later he learned that multiple tumors in the lung had appeared.
“The doctor called me and basically said, ‘Settle your affairs. Go on a vacation,’” he remembers. “At the time, 2007, there were very few treatment options.”
New Treatment Does the Trick
Fortunately, a new targeted treatment had just become available—and it worked for him. (Now, there are a number of targeted and immunotherapy medications for advanced kidney cancer.)
Andrew experienced fatigue, diarrhea, and sensitivity in his hands and feet. Plus, he says, “it’s very tough on your mouth. You get sores.” That meant lots of bland food. “The biggest challenge was trying to convince restaurants not to season their food.”
He gravitated toward comfort foods and cold cereal to keep up his weight and strength. “A baked potato with butter was something I could get through,” he recalls.
He kept working and even took assignments that required travel, as when he broadcast from Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake. “What kept me going was normalizing my life as much as I could,” he says.
“There were mornings I would say, ‘I can’t do it today,’” Andrew says. “But there were also days that I say, ‘I can’t do it today,’ and then I’d have a shower and I’d think, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go in.’”
当肿瘤出现在他的脊柱,他需要x射线检验ation, which brought a whole new level of fatigue. “I would get in the car on the way home from treatment and just fall asleep,” he says.
His spirits hit a low point and he was afraid his mood slump might be permanent. “But my therapist told me, ‘I don’t think you’re depressed, I think you’re grieving.’ I thought about the losses I was experiencing—my time, my quality of life, parts of my body. It made me feel much better, because I understood what was going on in my mind,” he says.
他在测试证实没有疾病证据证实后，持续治疗超过四年 - 几个月。最终他和他的医生讨论了脱离药物。“他说，'我们现在处于未知的领土，因为我们不知道会发生什么，”但安德鲁担心肿瘤会回归。他还担心，如果他留在药物中过长，如果未来需要它会变得无效。
“One day I thought, ‘I’m going to see what happens,’” he says. He stopped taking the drugs, and cancer has not returned.
When he felt stronger, he and his husband, Danny Everett Stewart, who married right after Andrew’s diagnosis, took time to follow their dreams, which included trips to Europe and New York City.
“It’s been a great joy,” Andrew says of his life after cancer. “Enjoy your time and really share those moments, because it will feed your soul.”
