Ray’s Blog

Early in the morning on July 12 Aydin and I were waking up, lying in bed together on our backs. Aydin lifted up his left leg high into the air and brought it down heel-first on me. It was completely unintentional and involuntary and it had caught me by surprise. I knew it would hurt a little but when I felt the pain I felt a tenderness that was unexpected. Not sure what to make of it, I felt around to see if I could feel anything out of the ordinary; I did. There was a lump that was movable about the size of a peanut.

As it would would turn out, Aydin had kicked me directly where my colon tumor was and the lump I felt was a swollen lymph node. This was completely inexplicable. Prior to that morning, I had not felt any specific pain there. What are the odds that you have a tumor that you don’t know exists and your son kicks it for you? How often do you get kicked in your ascending colon? That’s hard to do!

I am so lucky on so many counts: He kicked me in the colon, I recognized a different kind of pain, I bothered to feel for something, my lymph node happened to be swollen and I found it, I brought this to the attention of my doctor, they ordered a CT scan. I had no idea there was anything like this wrong with me and if Aydin hadn’t have found it there’s no telling how much longer it would have gone undiscovered.

Before its removal, my cancer was growing aggressively and was considered stage 3c which is as close to stage 4 you can be without being stage 4 (there is no stage 5). It had only been there for 6 to 12 months and was on the verge of spreading to the rest of my body when we caught it. He doesn’t realize it and won’t for some time but Aydin saved my life.

P.S. Aydin told me the reason why he kicked me was that he was dreaming about Kung Fu Panda.

Related posts:

1. Staging of Cancer
2. I Have Cancer
3. The Surgery
4. Prognosis by the Numbers
5. My Cancer is Worse Than Your Cancer