After months of hormone treatments and doctors’ visits, a Kamloops man’s chances of beating prostate cancer are fading.
CHAPTER TWO: HOPING AGAINST HOPE
(Originally published June 18, 2007 in the Kamloops Daily News)
BY CATHERINE LITT
Daily News Staff Reporter
The nights are the toughest for Ron Kopytko.
It has been eight months since his prostate cancer diagnosis and he feels tired much of the time but has been unable to sleep through the night.
Worry keeps him awake. So does the tenderness in his abdomen and the back pain, which comes and goes, and frequent urination.
There are the headaches, too, possibly caused from the estrogen. He isn’t certain. Ron has been on hormone therapy since November to reduce his testosterone. It seems to be doing its job; last week, his PSA was down to 5.5. It has been fluctuating all winter and spring — down to 2.4 in January, down to 0.9 in May, and now climbing again.
On a visit to his family doctor, Ron mentioned a website he found.
There’s a radiation clinic in Georgia that appears to have a high success rate in treating prostate cancer through a trademarked treatment called ProstRcision. Maybe this is something we should look into, suggested Ron.
But his doctor was careful not to raise Ron’s hopes — and gently reminded him, “This is not something we can cure.”
Ron called the Georgia clinic a few days later and spoke to someone on the intake team.
He told her his situation, his age, how and when he was diagnosed. She sounded curious. It seemed hopeful. Then Ron mentioned the word metastasis.
“Oh,” the reply. “You mean it has spread outside the prostate. That’s different from what we do.”
Hope dashed once again.
“I don’t know how he copes,” said Ron’s mother.
“So many times there seems like there’s hope and then it’s taken away.”
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The frustration is almost as bad as the worry.
It’s not that Ron and Leann aren’t used to hospitals and treatments or chronic illness. Ron has battled pancreatitis since age 25. He has had eight surgeries, mostly to remove parts of his scarred pancreas and parts of his intestine.
“In all honesty I thought if I was ever to get cancer it would be pancreatic cancer,” said Ron.
The pancreatitis is the reason he and Leann moved to Kamloops from Victoria in 1996. With Ron’s illness, he was spending a week out of every three or four months in hospital, suffering acute attacks. He had to give up his job as a correctional officer. At least in Kamloops he could work with his dad, Jim, and his younger brothers, Darren and Chad, in the family’s logging usiness when he was feeling well enough.
The four Kopytko men had always been close. They’d load up the log skidder, feller buncher, and button-top grappler, and head out to the bush for a week at a time. But soon Ron’s pancreatitis kept him from that, too.
Four years ago, he and Leann opened an auto detailing shop. Leann ran the shop while still working as a drug and alcohol counsellor, and Ron helped out when his health allowed it.
In January, with Ron’s cancer taking its toll, they sold the shop and went on a trip to Hawaii, a present from Ron’s parents. “He’s wanted to go to Hawaii since he was a little guy,” said Jim.
Was it the last family vacation? No one says it out loud but, inside, each of them is aware of time. It hangs over them like a loud clock.
“It doesn’t matter what you try to do in a day,” said his mom Bev. “Even if you’re happy for a little bit, it goes right back to that. You just feel the loss already.”
For Ron, thoughts of loss and death and time occupy his sleepless nights.
“It’s funny. Leann and I have talked for years — especially after my surgeries — the only thing that scares me is death,” he said.
“Now I have to face that. And I think probably in that last six months, since I was diagnosed, I’ve been able to look at that and, you know, probably accept that a little more than I could a couple of years ago.”
Preparing their children for his eventual death hasn’t been easy. Neither of them want Alyssa and Jake to be obsessed with death or time, but the kids already sense that time is running out. The other day Alyssa asked Ron, “Daddy, does God decide when you die?”
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It’s all any of them can think about. Time.
Jim, Darren and Chad went logging again last week. They wished they could cancel the job — it tears Jim up to have to leave his oldest son at this time. For the entire week they are away, Jim and the brothers will call Ron every day.
Bev, who lives just a few blocks from Ron and Leann, visits every day. Her emotions cycle from despair to frustration to anger. She worries what the children will do without a dad, what Leann will do without Ron. “I don’t know, I just feel sick,” said Bev. “I’m mad that there wasn’t anybody who went to the doctor more than him, and yet it was missed. Part of you is mad about that. You know, gypped on life.”
There isn’t anything Bev can do as a mother but watch now, and that kills her more than anything.
When she goes home at night, she prays for a miracle she fears will never come.
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Everyone wonders how Leann does it. She is so brave, so stoic as this tragedy unfurls. But they aren’t with her late at night, after the kids have gone to bed and it’s just Leann and Ron, crying and talking until 2 a.m., until they are too exhausted to cry or worry any more.
During the day, Leann’s co-worker, Rhonda Rowland, watches her from across the hall at the counselling centre. She sees Leann’s courage.
“It’s just so sad, you know, they have two little kids,” said Rowland.
“I have three little ones of my own and I just can’t imagine.”
The other day, Leann needed to bring Alyssa to work with her because lately the child is afraid to be home alone with Ron; she worries her dad will die suddenly and she won’t know what to do.
So Alyssa played on the boardroom floor while Leann counselled clients.
Leann understands what her daughter is going through. She has been there; she was seven when her father died of lung cancer.
“I remember going to see him in Smithers — that’s where they had him — and I remember my mother telling me that I had to tell him who I was when I went in,” recalled Leann.
“Maybe he was in a coma, but I don’t remember that part. But I remember taking off on her, getting really upset and taking off on her through the hospital and running and hiding in a broom closet because I was so cheesed at her that she wanted me to say, I’m your daughter, it’s Leann.’ To me that just didn’t make any sense. I was too little to understand.”
At her workplace, co-workers try to do what they can for Leann, try to give support and encouragement, try to keep her spirits up. In the beginning, there was hope that Ron might beat this disease, but hope is fading fast. They can all feel it.
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It’s time for the Survivors Lap to begin.
Alyssa wants to walk with Ron, and so do her cousins, Tyra and Madison, who’ve come to the Relay for Life fundraiser with their dad, Darren, and mom, Taura.
Leann’s workplace entered a team in the event and they’ve set up a tent along the perimeter of the relay track. Bev and Jim arrive, too, to support the team, and support Ron who has agreed to walk in the Survivors Lap.
Ron jokes with his brother Darren about arriving late. His family is used to his offbeat humour. “I told Leann we can’t be late for this,” Ron says, laughing before adding: “But that’s us, late for everything. I’ll probably be late for my own funeral.”
Just then, Alyssa and her cousins run over to Ron — and Bev watches the four of them dash off to the Survivors’ tent where Ron gets his yellow T-shirt.
Bev doesn’t want to let Ron out of her sight. She wishes she could smother him with hugs, kiss the disease away like she used to be able to kiss away the sting of a scraped knee. But all she and Jim can do now is watch and wait.
The Survivors Lap starts and a brass band leads the throng of yellow T-shirts along the relay pathway as they march to the cheers of onlookers. Leann, Taura, Jim, Bev and Darren move to the front of the path as the parade of yellow reaches their tent. They see Ron, tall and handsome, with Alyssa and his nieces prancing along beside him. Leann smiles as they parade past, but when the yellow shirts round the corner out of eyesight, she and Taura break down.
There are no words for the pain they feel. “It’s just so hard,” says Taura as she sobs into Leann’s shoulder.
The sight is no less heartbreaking for Darren, Jim and Bev. Bev watches Ron in the crowd of yellow T-shirts and notices someone holding a sign: Seven years cancer free.
Again, tonight, Bev will pray for a miracle.
Posted on October 27, 2007
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