Since summer of 2007, the Kamloops Daily News has been following the life of Ron Kopytko, a 41-year-old Kamloops man who was diagnosed with prostate cancer — a disease that normally hits men who are much older. Since then, Ron and his family have gone through the ups and downs of dealing with his terminal illness. Readers were introduced to the family last June when reporter Catherine Litt and photographer Murray Mitchell produced their first chapter in an ongoing series called Too Young To Die. Since then, four chapters have appeared in the Daily News, the latest of which ran in November 2007 and detailed how Ron Kopytko had made the difficult decision to pursue chemotherapy against the advice of some of his doctors.
Now, in Chapter 5, readers are taken deeper into the story of the Kopytko family’s struggle, and learn whether chemotherapy was indeed the right choice.
originally published June 21, 2008
The morning sun felt warm on his face as Ron Kopytko leaned forward in a canvas lawn chair and watched the two soccer teams zigzag across the field.
He could see his daughter Alyssa among the jumble of players, seven years old, lime-green jersey, blond pigtails poking straight up from the top of her head.
“Come on, Boo,” he shouted encouragingly. “That’s it, that’s it, get the ball.”
He’d called her Boo for as long as he could remember, and now that she was a Lime Girls player she proudly wore the name on the back of her jersey.
The Lime Girls were deep into their second game of a four-game weekend tournament on that morning and Ron was glad it wasn’t raining. Last night, it rained so hard for their first game, the poor kids got soaked. So did the parents. It rained so hard you could literally wring out your clothing. Moms and dads grumbled as they tried to cover themselves on the sidelines. Ron grumbled, too.
But then he remembered what mattered more than the rain.
He remembered the cancer and all that he’d been through these last 18 months, all that his family had been through. He was alive in the pouring rain. He was alive.
A SEASON OF CHANGE
Last winter was Ron Kopytko’s toughest.
He began the season with his first shot of chemotherapy, a desperate effort to slow the growth of the prostate cancer that was killing him.
For six rounds of chemo, spaced meticulously 21 days apart, Ron and his wife Leann made their familiar trip to the eighth floor of Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops where a year earlier they’d been told Ron had terminal cancer and that, at best, he had 12, maybe 18, months to live.
He’d already surpassed the one-year mark and wanted to extend, as much as possible, the weeks or months remaining, which is why in November he and Leann made the difficult decision to pursue chemotherapy over a clinical drug trial that a respected prostate cancer specialist in Vancouver had wanted Ron on.
“What we’re trying to do is apply the brakes to a disease that’s progressing,” Dr. Martin Gleavehad told Ron at the time. “Most of the data would say that giving chemo now as opposed to later isn’t going to make that much of a difference.”
But Ron’s oncologist in Kamloops
had told him about a kind of chemo, Docetaxel, which is given to patients with advanced prostate cancer. It could extend his survival by two or three months, he said. Possibly up to two years.
“Can it beat the cancer up enough to push it into remission?” Ron had asked Dr. Ardashes Avanessian.
Yes, replied the doctor.
That was all Ron needed to hear.
So, with Leann at his side every 21 days, he sat in a little room on the eighth floor and watched the chemo drip into his veins, praying it would steal pieces of the cancer as easily as it stole his hair.
“I was actually surprised at how fast my hair started falling out,” he would recall later.
“It wasn’t long after the first session that I’d run my hands through and it was coming out it clumps.”
Ron’s mother, Bev Kopytko, watched over him closely. Each time he went for a chemo session, she bought him a card and wrote words of encouragement inside. We love you. We’re behind you. We’re thinking of you.
By the time Ron’s final chemo session ended on Feb. 12, a day before his 41st birthday, his head was bald and his face had that characteristic puffiness, “moon face” they call it, that many chemo patients get from the accompanying steroids.
But there was more to be worried about than baldness and bloating as Ron would quickly learn.
His prostate was enlarged again – alarmingly so. His PSA was down but the prostate, it almost seemed to be at odds with it. And there was a pain in his lower back. It was so bad he could hardly sit. Had the cancer gone to his bones?
As February turned into March, the pain grew.
Ron wondered if maybe the chemo hadn’t worked at all.
SEARCHING FOR NORMAL
In April, Ron’s parents sent the family on a vacation to Maui. Ron looked pale; a little time away in the sunshine would do him well, they hoped.
For two weeks, Ron, Leann and their children, Jake and Alyssa, soaked up the Hawaiian sun and tried to think about everything but time. Ever since the cancer diagnosis 17 months prior, time was all they thought about. How much was left? How fast was it running out? Would Ron see another Christmas? Another birthday? Another Father’s Day? It was a persistent undercurrent.
Maui, though, would prove to be the first occasion since his diagnosis that the family felt normal again. The cancer was still there, but somehow it didn’t lord over them the way it had. Ron soaked up the sunshine and the feeling of normalcy. It had been a long time since he’d felt both.
But if he had learned anything over the past few months it was that normalcy was a fleeting notion, a fantasy, no longer within his grip. Almost as soon as the family returned from Maui, Ron’s oncologist ordered a bone scan.
MORE TESTS, FEW ANSWERS
On April 30, Ron arrived at Royal Inland Hospital’s diagnostic imaging department and took a seat in a waiting room with four other people, among them, a woman who looked to be in her mid-50s, her scalp covered with a silk scarf.
She overheard Ron talking about his chemo.
“You’re done chemo?” she asked.
“Yep,” said Ron, “I finished Feb. 12.”
Then she asked him what kind of cancer.
Prostate; it’s terminal, he told her.
The woman studied Ron for a moment. She looked at his hair, close-cropped, almost fuzzy, a curious blend of grey and blond since the chemo. She looked at his face, tanned and handsome.
“You look very healthy,” she said.
He did. Maybe it was the tan from Maui but, despite all the pain and the swelling and the mornings he felt so sick he couldn’t lift his head out of bed, he looked good. Everywhere he went, he heard it over and over. He didn’t look like a man dying of cancer.
But he was, and the fact that he was back at the hospital for another diagnostic test was a reminder of that.
“Ron Kopytko . . .,” called a nurse with a clipboard.
The nurse led Ron into a room where he was greeted by Sarah Emard, a nuclear medicine technologist with an easy manner and warm smile.
“You know the drill,” teased Emard as Ron stretched himself out on a narrow table.
Emard asked Ron to put his legs together and then she pulled a long piece of masking tape from a roll and wrapped it around his ankles. The tape would keep his pelvis in proper alignment for the imaging.
“This is our bondage, isn’t it Ron.”
Ron laughed. “Yep, no doubt,” he said.
For the next hour, he remained perfectly still as the machine closed around him and moved slowly up and down the length of his body. A computer screen flickered as Ron’s skeletal outline took shape.
Time passed slowly but peacefully as the machine rotated around his midsection, then his chest and finally his head. The time gave Ron a chance to think without distraction.
It was, in an odd way, a lot like his visits to Sitavana Buddhist Forest Monastery outside of Kamloops, the spiritual retreat he’d been going to for almost a year.
Ron loved it out there. The 40-minute drive from the city took him into another world (“You get out of your vehicle and everything seems to change.”) It was Leann who had introduced him to the monastery’s abbot, Ajahn Sona. The monk had been helping Ron come to terms with cancer and death.
He taught Ron to think about his illness in a different way. Stop trying to make things certain, he’d say. Life was uncertain; when Ron understood that, he would find peace.
Ron visited the monastery several times throughout the fall and winter and was so inspired by the monk’s wisdom he added one of Ajahn Sona’sphrases to the growing artwork of tattoos on his arm: “Don’t worry, everything’s out of control.” Ron had also added a tattoo of the Hindu deity Ganesha to his right forearm. Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles.
On one of his visits to the monastery, Ron saw a meditation room. Ajahn Sonapointed to a mantle on which there were four photographs of people facingillness. Ron’s photo was among them.
When the monks meditate, said Ajahn Sona, they radiate goodwill and healing to those four photographs.
“Radiation therapy,” he said.
HOPEFUL NEWS ARRIVES
“Did you hear the bone scan was negative?” asked Dr. Chris Coppin, as he entered an examination room at Royal Inland Hospital’s cancer clinic on May 9.
Dr. Coppin was smiling. As a visiting oncologist, this was his second meeting with Ron and Leann, and he was pleased to deliver some good news.
“Yes, the bone scan was normal,” continued Dr. Coppin, as he sat down and thumbed through a handful of medical papers.
Leann squeezed Ron’s hand.
“That’s awesome,” she said. It was the first piece of good news they’d heard in months.
But the elation would be short-lived as Ron began to explain how the swelling in his groin was as bad, perhaps worse, than it was just before he was diagnosed with cancer. It was all through his pelvis and upper thighs. It was painful, and he was up at night four or five times urinating.
“Are you suspicious the disease is active again?” asked Dr. Coppin, concerned.
He looked at Ron then flipped through the medical papers. “When was your last CT scan?” he asked. “I think we should do another one.”
Outside the room after the appointment, Leann tried to stay positive. “Really, I guess he’s pretty lucky,” she said of her husband, “This is the 18-month mark.”
Three weeks later, Ron returned to the diagnostic imaging department at Royal Inland Hospital for his CT scan. Again, he arrived to a waiting room full of patients but this time he didn’t speak to anyone. He woke that morning feeling tired and rundown and in little mood for conversation.
His existence had become a rotating series of medical appointments. If he wasn’t meetingwith his oncologist, his urologist or his family doctor, he was undergoing yet another scan or blood test or PSAtest, or gettinganother hormone shot or IV drip of something.
There had been so many appointments he’d lost count. And here he was again, perhaps at his most important appointment yet, the one that would determine if his cancer was reactivated, and he wasn’t sure how he felt.
“You know, I kind of feel indifferent about it,” he said as he waited for a nurse to call his name.
He wasn’t looking for the cancer to be there but if it showed up in the scan he wouldn’t be surprised.
At least it would explain the pain and the swelling.
ANXIOUSNESS MIXES WITH WORRY
On Wednesday, June 4, Ron went to see his family physician for a PSA test. Even though his cancer had long since spread to his lymph glands, the amount of PSA (prostate specific antigen) in his bloodstream was still a vital indicator of how well or how ill he was.
Ron’s PSA came in at 0.16 nanograms per millilitre, the lowest it had ever been.
It was a mere trace of the 285 ng/ml in his system when he was diagnosed with cancer in October 2006 and it was promising news, he thought; even if the results of the CT scan, which he was due to get the following day, showed the cancer had reactivated, at least his PSA wasn’t feeding it.
That next morning, Ron and Leann woke early. They were both anxious to get the results of the CT scan.
Anxious and nervous.
They arrived at Royal Inland Hospital on time for Ron’s 10:30 a.m. appointment and were greeted by several nurses they had come to know well, friendly faces who eased so many of their visits.
Ron hopped onto a weigh scale in the hallway outside the nurses’ station and joked, as he did every time, “I might have to take off all my clothes – looks like I gained some weight.”
Leann and the nurses giggled. “That must be Ron out there,” piped one of them from around a corner.
Ron was a consummate joker and he never disappointed the nurses or Leann, who always played along.
Quietly, though, Leann was thinking about the CT scan. Ron’s swelling was just like it had been the week before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We’re right back where we started.
As they waited in an exam room for Dr. Coppin, Leann and Ron braced themselves for bad news.
Coppin walked in, a file of medical papers under his arm.
He took a seat and began to speak. The CT results were in, he said. Those four images the machine recorded looked great. The lymph nodes looked normal.
And the pain Ron had been experiencing for so long? There was a tiny hairline fracture in his tailbone. As for the swelling – that was most likely due to lymphatic blockages.
Ron and Leann listened carefully, absorbing every word, trying to understand, interpret, decode what the doctor was telling them.
Finally, Leann asked the question.
“Does this mean that Ron’s in remission?”
She wasn’t even sure why she asked it. After all, remission had never been spoken as an option. Ron’s cancer was metastasized; it was in his lymphatic system. He was dying from it. Remission wasn’t in the picture and so there was no point in getting hopeful only to be disillusioned once again, right?
But Leann couldn’t help herself. She had to know.
“Is this remission? Is this what remission is?”
Dr. Coppin smiled.
“Oh, I guess I should explain,” he said, apologetically. “Technically, you are in what we would consider as close to remission as possible, given that we never thought it would be possible. It’s amazing really.”
It was astonishing news, and Leann and Ron sat there stunned, trying to make sense of the moment. Had they really heard him correctly? Did he really say remission?
He had.
“Could it last a year?” asked Ron.
No but we can hope that it will last some months, said the doctor.
As they left the hospital that morning, Ron couldn’t wait to tell his mother the good news.
Bev was in her car on her way to the mall when her cellphone rang. “Mom, I’m in remission.”
That afternoon, Ron, Leann, Bev and Leann’s mother, Jean, went to Milestones Grill and Bar for a celebratory lunch.
Ron’s dad and brothers were logging trees out of town, trying to get a good chunk of work done before his dad’s 61st birthday that weekend. “When Dad calls tonight,” Ron said to his mom, “tell him he’s got an early birthday present.”
SURPASSING ANOTHER MARKER
The following week, as Ron watched his daughter play soccer, he thought about the unexpected turn of events.
He was by no means cancer-free, but at least he had surpassed another marker, another deadline for his own mortality.
He had learned a lot about himself since getting sick and he thought about that, too, a lot about the things that mattered and the things that didn’t. Getting soaked by the rain didn’t matter. Being around to watch Alyssa play soccer, that mattered.
Across town that very morning, participants were getting ready for the Canadian Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. It was exactly a year ago that Ron pulled on a yellow T-shirt and walked, reluctantly, in the relay’s survivor lap with all the people who had beaten cancer. He wondered then if he truly belonged with them, given his prognosis.
He still wasn’t sure if he belonged in a survivors’ group, even now, even with this latest piece of good news.
But he didn’t want to think about timelines and deadlines anymore. He’d learned too much about what really mattered.
“If I live another four months or 10 months, on some level I’m glad that they told me I had only 12 or 18 months in the beginning,” he said.
“It kind of makes you stop and take a little more time and appreciate things a little bit more.”
Minutes later, the soccer game was over. Alyssa’s team, the Lime Girls, lost the match, the Blue Whales beating them 2-1.
Alyssa, disappointed, walked over to her parents. Ron and Leann put their arms around the little girl.
“Hey, you guys did great,” said Ron, as he hugged his daughter.
“You guys did great.”
Posted on June 20, 2008
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