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Health & Fitness

The Story of Bruce Jensen and His Upcoming Cancer Benefit

My daughter is organizing a benefit to help with my battle with cancer. I provide a bit of history about that battle with this blog.

My daughter Laura is for me next Saturday and she wrote a brief bio on why. I'd like to supplement what she posted. 

I'm 57.  Up until I was 54, I was very healthy, liked to run, kept myself fit.  When asked who my "primary care" physician was, I couldn't answer because I never saw a physician, primary or otherwise. 

That all changed the fall of 2009.  I'd had a nagging sore throat for a few months - not painful, just annoying, just there.  I asked the dentist who said ask the doctor who said ask the ENT doctor and away we went.  Sudden whirlwind of appointments, tests, assessments, scans, on and on.  The day before Thanksgiving the ENT doc called me and told me that I had a cancerous tumor on my right tonsil, which I didn't even know was possible.  Less than two weeks later I was taking radiation treatments to kill that tumor.

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Radiation is a long, strange, slow trip.  It knocks you down a bit at first, then that knock down accelerates, more and more and you lose track of how far down you are, how far down you'll go, if there's an end point and if so, when... When you do start to recover, it is so slight you don't even notice for a while, and when you do, it then goes so slowly and takes so long.  The docs tell you over a year to recover but you don't quite believe it until you live it.

Radiation was to my neck, of course.  This seriously compromised my ability to swallow.  My entire existence for months was centered around simply getting enough nourishment down my throat.  I fought that battle every day unsuccessfully.  My weight dropped to less than it was when I was in middle school.  I looked like a walking skeleton.  I was also out of work for quite awhile and had the inability to pay bills as an additional stressor.  Of course, my family watched the whole process very closely.

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Eventually, I did bottom out and get better and life settled in to all the normal routines of work, worry about the kids, do your best to make ends meet.  By this past summer I was back in good shape, feeling great, follow up appointments had just been stretched out to every six months with the cancer doc. 

At the June appointment, the doc noticed something he didn't like on my tongue.  I said it felt a little different on the right side - didn't hurt, wasn't even bothersome, just a bit different.  Well, that led to a call from the doc on July 3 that I had cancer on my tongue.  This keeps up, I'm going to start getting paranoid about holidays - diagnosed the day before Thanksgiving the first time and the day before the 4th of July this time. 

Next the all-too-familiar whirlwind of assessments, consultations, scans, tests, appointments for weeks.  This time it culminated with surgery to remove the tumor from my tongue and lymph nodes from the right side of my neck at Mayo on Aug. 9.  I came home Aug. 11.  Back to the same issue.  My neck has been traumatized again.  Eating is #1 issue again.  But there is one blessedly huge difference.  With radiation, it's a slow fall, a slow recovery and you have no sense of what the time line actually is.  With surgery, you get clobbered but good right away but you know that the worst just passed.  By Aug. 11 I was already light years better than Aug. 9.  The fight is so much easier because you can see the markers of improvement and success so much more easily.

When my daughter Laura first heard about the tongue cancer, she said within days that she wanted to organize a benefit so that I would not have to repeat the stress of not being able to cover bills like the recovery a couple of years ago.  She has put together this amazing event at the Saturday, Sept. 15 5-10 PM.  I am so impressed with the work she has put in to this event.  There will be a spaghetti dinner, a dessert bar, a silent auction and lots and lots of great live music.  I'm going to have a blast.  Hope to see you there, Bruce

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