Introduction: Please, tell us your first name, gender and your age and maybe a short discribtion about yourself, family, profession, where you live......
Answer: My name is Nicholas, I am a male and am now 17 years old. I am a very active person, have a father, mother, and two brothers. I live now in Rochester, New York, but when I had a thymoma I lived in Omaha, Nebraska.
Diagnosis: 1. How was your cancer detected? Answer: I had pneumonia in the spring of 4th grade and they did a routine chest x-ray and they discovered a mass in my chest that they diagnosed as a benign thymoma. This was the spring of 1999.
2. Did you feel any kind of pain or did you notice a change of your body? Answer: Slightly prior and so far after I have had complications with breathing. It is basically post-surgery asthma. 3. Do you know your staging? Answer: I don't know my staging.
4. Do you have a family history of cancer? Answer: Not of this cancer.
5. Did you have any kind of surgery before? Answer: No Treatment: 6. What kind of treatment did you receive (be as specific as possible) -surgery (was your cancer invasive? which organs where involved?) Answer: I had surgery and the cancer was not invasive beyond the thymus.
-chemotherapie ( name the chemo and write down how many rounds you received) Answer: none
-radiation (what dosis did you receive) -or a different kind of treatment Answer: none
Where there any kind of side effects involved in your treatment? Answer: They touched my ventrical nerve and caused the left half of my diaphragm to become inflamed, causing my left lung to shrink to half of its capacity. 7. Feelings - Emotions What was your feeling when you heard your diagnosis? ( The answer to this question might be very helpful for all new patients!) Answer: I was young, so I was naive about what was truely wrong with me, but I did feel scared because I knew it was a rare cancer and I didn't know if I would die or not. I was also 11 at the time of surgery.
How did you feel during your treatment - For example: During chemo you might have felt nausiated Answer: I had pain in my chest after surgery, but it went away.
8. What was the most difficult part during your treatment Answer: Having a catheter.
9. Where were you treated (name the hospital with the full adress ) Answer: Omaha Children's Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska
10. If you can recommend your doctor let us know his/her name. Answer: I can't
11. What tip could you give a new patient? Answer: Do research on the internet.
12. What bothered you the most during your treatment? Answer: Not knowing exactly what was wrong with me.
13. What helped you most during this period? Answer: My family.
14. How're you feeling today? Answer: I am feeling totaly fine today. 15. Tell us a bit about your check-ups? - Where do you get your check-ups - How often do you go for a check up? - What do they do at your check up? Answer: I did my check ups at the hospital where my surgery happened. They used to be frequent, then swithched to every six months, then to every year and now every 5 years. 16. How do you feel before you have to go to a check up - Are you nervous, relaxed ..... Answer: Mainly relaxed, though there have been worysome spots on some of my follow up x-rays.
17. What do you do to make this time as easy as posssible? - For example: You take a friend or relativ with you Answer: Take a family member or friend. 18. Do you take any precautions to prevent the recurrence from cancer? Answer: No 19. Have you made significant changes to your life after you got cancer? Answer: no 20. How 're you feeling about the disease - are you optimistic about outcome from your cancer - are you more afraid that it might return Answer: Yes, I don't believe that the cancer will return. 21. Status - how is your progress? ie. chemo didn't work, don't want to do surgery or radiation since it is too invasive at this point. Answer: Cancer was very successful, the tumor has not returned.
22. Ideas/recommendation ... Answer: none 23. Leave your e-mail adress in case you want to get contacted from other thymoma patients
