06/19/2026
Good afternoon everyone!
I’ve been out quite a bit and since I posted my health journey many of you have been checking in and asking how I’m doing. I know my team is protective of me so unless I’ve run into you on one of my visits there…it’s been hard to get info.
So forgive me but I’m going to give a long update here. (I know you aren’t surprised I can get very wordy so here is your warning to stop reading. Lol)
As most know last year I had a lump on my upper thigh that was originally diagnosed as swelling from a strain. Unfortunately it kept getting larger and after much fighting with insurance we finally got the tests we needed and confirmed our fears…the mass was malignant and even worse was a rare and aggressive sarcoma.
The technical name is undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma. Yeah…leave it to me to get something rare.
This is a fast-moving cancer that likes to come back. Many of you offered all sorts of treatments and I spent a good amount of time going down rabbit holes looking into them…but ultimately my family and I decided to stick with the medical team we had at UCSD and move forward. You see…by the time we had a diagnosis this thing was large and growing exponentially. What started as a golf ball sized bump when we realized something wasn’t right…ballooned to the size of a cantaloupe by the time we got it out! We had no time to consider anything alternative. We needed it out. (Please, while I know you mean well…don’t offer any insights, theories or “proven cures”. It’s just exhausting and I need to save my energy.) ❤️
Anyway….i went through 25 days of radiation then had to recover from that before surgery. The rapid growth made surgery difficult and took a team of surgeons. One to remove it, my vascular surgeon to bypass veins and arteries that were too close to leave, and the plastics surgeon to reconstruct me.
The mass was 4.5 pounds and they had to remove all four quad muscles to get clear margins. After the vascular surgeon was done, the plastic surgeon cut me from my waist to my sternum to harvest ab muscles to fill the void left from the removal
So I woke up after an 8 hour surgery and learned I may need a walker going forward and almost for sure would be wearing a leg brace since I had no quads. I had a wound vac and drains all over and things were a bit blurry. Spent a week in the hospital and spent the next six weeks at home in wraps and a full leg brace since nothing could bend for 6 weeks.
My team at the station did a great job of handling everything for me so I could simply focus on healing. Well…God has been good to me and all the sutures healed quickly. Once I could take the full leg brace off and allow the knee to bend we got busy with PT. I had one drain that hung around for 12-14 weeks and a fluid pocket in my thigh that has required a couple of visits to drain. But for the last 8 weeks I’ve only been wearing compression wraps for fluid buildup but no leg brace. I was spending time at the station between appointments and getting back to my new normal.
Then I had my first post op scans and unfortunately have developed a nodule in one lung. They gave me the option of waiting for the next quarterly scan to see if grew or having a lung biopsy to find out now.
We chose now.
Last Friday we got the biopsy results and unfortunately it is the same cancer that has spread. So if it’s in one spot I have to assume there is a very real possibility it can be waiting to pop up in other places as well. We have options. We have more scans on Monday…and depending on what they show, we have made the difficult choice to go hard as soon as we can with chemo. The tumor responded well to radiation so we considered that for this one too…but time isn’t on our side as we learned the first time.
So unfortunately this means more time away as treatment continues so I had to use this venue to update our customers since next week is filled with visits to prep us.
It means the world to me that so many care enough to check in. For those that pray we would love those. For those that don’t your support still means more than you can know.
While some accuse me of over sharing…my hope is if anyone is out there going through something similar know you are not alone!
❤️
Dave
