Lung cancer: Survivor

BRIAN McGARVEY suffered a seizure in 2001, but his doctors at Abington Memorial Hospital couldn't figure out what caused it. And they were troubled by his persistent cough. Tests revealed that a tumor was blocking the airway to his lungs.

"I guess I was shocked, but I wasn't too surprised because I was a 35-year smoker.," McGarvey said. "I had stopped smoking two years prior to being diagnosed with lung cancer, so I thought I had dodged the bullet, but obviously I hadn't."

Now 63, the Lower Gwy-nedd resident turned to Fox Chase Cancer Center for treatment.

"My wife is also a cancer survivor, so we have stock in Fox Chase," joked McGarvey. His wife was treated for thyroid cancer and then, 10 years ago, for bilateral breast cancer.

After undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, McGarvey had surgery to remove a lung in May 2002. He tried to defer the surgery until after his daughter's June wedding, but couldn't because it needed to be done shortly after his radiation treatments ended. McGarvey shared his story with Melanie Menkevich of the Daily News.

Here comes the survivor. "The doctors said for my daughter's wedding, which was a month after my surgery, that they would put me on painkillers and get me to the church, aim me up the aisle and set me off. And that's what I did; a month after surgery, I walked my daughter up the aisle."

That moment, he said, was the high point of his cancer odyssey.

The resilience of the human body. "It's surprising what the human body can go through and recover from. The treatment is intended to kick the hell out of the tumor, but it also does the same to your body.

"My doctor told me that the trick was to kill the tumor before the treatment killed me. Going through all the treatment — the chemo, the radiation and the surgery — you're really knocked down, to say the least.

"You come back from it. I have come back from it.

"It was a psychological high when I was finished all the treatment and came home and knew I didn't have to go back for anymore."

Is there a nurse in the house? "My wife is a nurse. She sat with me through four hours of chemo and effusion every third Monday. When I came home from the hospital, I got dehydrated and so she was able to start running IVs, hydrating me at home so I wouldn't have to go back to the hospital.

"She plugged me into the IV and said she was going to the mall shopping and she'd be back in an hour."

Knights of the Roundtable. "I also run a group called The Men's Roundtable at the Wellness Community in Lansdale, which is a cancer education-and-support operation headquartered in Fairmount Park.

"It meets one Saturday every month, and it's all guys who have had various types of cancer or who are currently under treatment.

"Some of those guys come in and they are so deflated and mad. Some of them say, 'I'm not going to do any of the chemo stuff or any of the nasty stuff,' and the guys always point out to them that 'You're going to go through that. It's not about you, it's about your family.'

"I don't know any of them who came in saying they weren't going to go through it that didn't go through it."

Light at the end of the tunnel. "With the proper support, which is very important, and proper treatment, the disease is beatable. We cancer survivors never say that we're 'cured.' We just say that we survived cancer, because you never know when it can come back. It's not the end of the world.

"I'm on a panel at Fox Chase called Facing Lung Cancer that runs about every three months. I sit up in the front with the doctors, nurses and social workers who give presentations. There are two or three of us cancer survivors who take questions and answer them.

"You see how down in the dumps all the newly diagnosed people are, and that's understandable to me, and what I try and get across is how you can have a very bad disease but there can be a light at the end of the tunnel."

"It's not easy to get to the end of the tunnel, but you can."