Here I am a young 33 year old guy. I run, I play sports, I eat healthy.
We're excited. We have a baby on the way. We're getting the nursery ready. Our families are excited.
I had acute appendicitis and needed to get my appendix out, and I think everything's fine. I think I'm on the path to be unhealthy and I would be just going back to my normal life.
We're ready to move on and move forward. And it turns out that they had found a tumor and it was cancer. I lost my father to cancer, about 12 years ago. So, that word cancer is really scary.
This is a situation where the stakes are high. This is not what color is the dress are going to be in baby's room. So I reach out to Mayo Clinic and from there the process was really easy.
We're going to fly to Mayo Clinic and we're going to get some answers.
Ryan was a patient that I met in concert with Tim Hobday, M.D., one of our medical oncologists. He has a very rare tumor called an appendiceal neuroendocrine tumor.
Like what is a neuroendocrine tumor? How common is this? And, and where could it have spread?
It's a specific cell in the GI track which becomes abnormal. There are a few subsets that can be very aggressive and of course that's the one that we really worry about. He starting a young family, so again, there's a lot of considerations that he had to take into account. So both Tim and I laid that out for him and then collectively we made a good choice, a reasonable decision for colectomy. We use robotics for Ryan. The benefits to the patient are improved pain control, improved length of stay, improved GI recovery.
Having a plan, knowing that we're going to be getting the best care possible gave us tremendous amount of peace of mind.
The outcome is perfect. That is what we hope for every patient. Again, his likelihood of recurrence is really quite small.
It feels like we have gone through a lot to get here now, but now it feels like we can we can move forward and put this behind us.
My family's been wonderful, folks at Mayo were wonderful and I'm just a lucky guy.