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Keeping the Faith

greg

Greg

Labancz

On February 13th 2013 (which was two days after our six month wedding anniversary), bright and early at 2:00am. Greg and I were in bed sleeping when all of a sudden I woke up to screams, I quickly turned on the light looked over and I realized that he was having a seizure. I walked over to his side of the bed and made sure he wouldn’t fall off or harm himself in some way. Of course after that he was taken by ambulance to the hospital and by that point he was acting like his normal self and actually kind of mad he was at the emergency room. The doctor that was taking care of him to my dismay did not believe that he had a seizure and probably thought I was crazy but to my luck Greg’s parents were with me and forced the doctor to perform a CAT scan since his grandfather actually had a brain tumor. After that scan the doctor was shocked and so were we, in the scan they discovered a mass in the left frontal lobe of his brain. From that point a date was chosen to biopsy the mass. His surgery was the end of February which he recovered from amazingly well. Once the results were back we found out that this journey was not over with since it was indeed cancer. His specific type of brain tumor was an Anaplastic Astrocytoma stage three. When we found out that was the beginning of radiation and chemotherapy. Greg ended up taking Temodar for his chemo which with that and radiation did tucker him out quite a bit. From that first point in February to the beginning of October Greg was forced not to work, which in all reality was killing his spirit more than having cancer since work is all that he knows. The sad part is after only being back to work for two weeks Greg found out in October of 2013 he was to have another brain surgery and that it would be different from the first. This time he was to be awake to make sure they wouldn’t paralyze him or make him mute which was a big fear, also he was to be apart of a trial study for a drug called Tocagen. When the surgery happened they removed almost all of the tumor besides a few cells which they injected with Tocagen and just like last time he did amazing after brain surgery and was able to leave after two nights. Now we are at the point of just waiting and getting MRI’s every two months. He has just been signed up again for the Tocagen trial since for him it is working, so why stop a good thing? Throughout this whole journey Greg has had an extremely good outlook on life. He would still rather help someone else instead of himself and just wants his family to be happy. We are very happy he was chosen to be a part of this study since not knowing what would of happened just scares us. Greg is still not in remission but he is heroically fighting and he will continue to fight.