I almost Died in August - My Cancer spread back

Those have been two of the wildest months of my life.

Not only has the cancer spread back in my entire lower body, it really almost killed me just a few weeks ago. Like, I said goodbye to everyone I love and know kind of danger!

So first what happened?

In late July, I was getting in more pain every day with my digestive system and just thought to myself that this might be caused by obstipation or something like that. With stomas (artificial stomach exit) this is nothing uncommon.

One day the pain got so immense we had to do a CT at 3 am in the night in the hospital.

After waiting 6 hours without pain meds in the ambulance, I got the bad news. It's the cancer causing the pain and it's already big.

Multiple knots in my lower body and my hip are so full, that they can't differentiate between cancer and the digestive system anymore. My kidneys are also already very much in danger and need to be operated on very soon! They were already starting to fail and making me tired.

Now I had to decide whether I should try fighting this one last time or give up and die at home within days. This really was a difficult choice, because if I went into surgery to save my kidneys, then I could have a much worse death.

Either live and maybe die much worse a few weeks later or die now peacefully. I cannot describe how hard this was!

I've seen the faces of my family, hoping that I'll continue to fight and so I just did that.

The surgery did not go well. I bleeded for weeks after it.

I lost soo much blood every day, that we couldn't even fill it up with someone elses in the same period of time. It looked like I was 100% going to die very very soon.

This is when I decided to give up. I wanted to die in my own home. In my own bed.

We organized everything with palliative end-of-life care and left the hospital in tears early.

This moment saved my life:

In the very last moments before leaving the hospital an unknown oncologist entered my room.

He presented himself and told me he was tasked with finding a special and experimental therapy against my tumor. Back in February when we removed 2kg of tumor mass, we had sent a lot of it to be analyzed on a genetic level. Looking for gene defects in the tumor's DNA.

Now 6 months later the results are ready and they actually found two weak points.

They have one drug ready to go for me to take at home, which should immediately shrink my tumor within a week. For the second drug, they first need to get the permission of the German and US healthcare lobby. This can take months, but is worth a chance!

So it went. I was leaving the hospital with one last attempt at saving my life or I might die within days at home. I had to have absolute luck to survive long enough for the new drug to shrink my tumor. To be honest my hopes were pretty low of it saving my life actually.

5 days later at home, the bleeding suddenly stopped for one day.

It quickly came back bleeding for another two days and then stopped again.

I could sense that my body was trying to heal me as fast as possible and my tumor trying to kill me at the same time.

It's a cat-and-mouse game. Whoever is faster wins. My body was in so much distress to keep me alive I started getting a very high fever, nausea, and more.

I couldn't leave my bed for about 2.5 weeks straight, because I was too weak.

Very slowly I started to feel better. The new drug is actually doing its job. My constant pain slowly went away and the tumor knots you could feel through my skin disappeared!

Against all odds, I actually survived till my 22nd birthday. All my friends came and organized a great party for me.

Two weeks later now and I'm feeling almost as good as in June, back when I thought I was healed.

Of course, I do know that my cancer isn't gone now. All I have for now is time and hope.

I am alive and fighting for my loved ones. They are my reason to live and to continue.

Of course, I hope to have years left to live, but for now, I'm happy with every moment I am able to experience. I'm truly happy and try to enjoy every day that I have.

Thanks for reading!

This sums up how crazy my last two months were and how close I escaped death.

Cheers

Alex