Hiking the Pfeifferhorn

I wrote earlier about discovering that my cancer had returned on the 4th of July. I responded to that by taking Eli hiking up White Pine. The bushwhacking misadventure that we had on the way down inspired me to spend quite a bit of time looking over maps of the area, and that in turn inspired me to try for a solo attempt of the Pfeifferhorn the next Friday. The Pfeifferhorn, which USGS topos incorrectly refer to as the Little Matterhorn, is a 11,326 foot triangular peak with views of Utah Lake, Lone Peak, the Great Salt Lake, the ridge line between Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons, Snowbird, and Timpanogas. Phil, Matt, and I tried to hike it in June 2009 and turned back when the weather started to look threatening, but not before Phil took this picture:



Good times. This year I got started right around noon by myself and followed the trail to Upper Red Pine Lake. Past that point the trail disappears, so I bushwhacked through the scree above the lakes. I made two significant mistakes here. First, I went to the east of the upper lake even though I knew that I would need to work my way to the west to actually summit the Pfeifferhorn. Furthermore, instead of trying to gain the ridge as quickly as possible and then taking a leisurely ridgewalk to the foot of the Pfeifferhorn, I traversed across scree and snow fields a couple hundred yards below the ridge for far too long. These mistakes probably added an hour and a half to the time that it took me to get up, but I did get a fantastic view of the Red Pine Lakes while I was traversing above them:



When I finally got to the ridge, I discovered that there's actually a very nice trail along the top of it. I walked west along the ridge for a while and made some 3rd class moves to get to the base of the Pfeifferhorn. I was pretty exhausted by this point and was not a happy camper when I finally looked up at the summit block and realized that I still had about 400 feet of vertical to climb to get from the ridge to the top:



This was probably the closest I came to turning around all day. I was really tired and walking along at 11,000 feet had really take its toll on me, but fortunately I kept going. By going a bit to the left of the ridge, I found a decent path up and 45 minutes later I was looking down from the 11,326 ft summit. (If I remember right, it only took me something like 18 minutes to get down. I was that tired going up.) The view from the top was absolutely amazing. I took a panorama that now serves as the background for the title of this blog. I also took a nice image looking east at White Baldy, Red Baldy, Red Top, the American Fork Twins, Hidden Peak, and Baldy. Yes, White Baldy, Red Baldy, and Baldy are a different mountains and they're all in this picture:



I made it down 3 hours or so after leaving the summit, which was only a bit more than half the time it took me to get to the top. Apparently my route finding on the way up really was just that bad. Still, this hike counts as one of the high points of the last 8 months and maybe of the last 21 years. I suspect that few if any metastatic melanoma tumors have ever visited such a beautiful place. I'm very grateful that I had the strength to make it up an amazing peak after such a stressful week, although I'm pretty sure that making it up that last stretch to the summit was more a matter of willpower than strength. Fighting melanoma has truly been miserable, but the motivation to get out and climb mountains has certainly been one of the bright spots, and this hike was a prime example of that.

Black Humor

This article isn't particularly well written, but as a cancer patient who has developed a bit of a black sense of humor myself, I found it interesting:

Facing Cancer, Sharing Laughter

On that note, I need to confess to something horrible I did a few weeks ago. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had some scans done at Altaview Hospital at the beginning of November that showed some nodules in my lungs. Although I now know that the nodules were nothing more than inflammation, for a few weeks I thought I was dealing with stage IV melanoma. So when I got a phone call from Altaview asking me for feedback on my recent visit to their hospital, I couldn't help thinking that the visit could have gone better. I managed to control myself as the woman on the other end of the phone, who sounded like a typical bouncy blonde cheerful Utah 24 year old, asked me to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 statements like "The technicians made sure to call me by name." But when she got to the end of the phone call and asked "Is there anything we could have done to make your experience better?" I paused for a moment before giving in to temptation: "You mean other than not finding cancer in my lungs? No, nothing comes to mind." The poor girl had no idea how to respond, and I feel slightly bad for subjecting her to my black humor, but the stunned silence on her end of the line made my morning.

Thanksgiving 5K

At the beginning of November I signed up to run a 5k to raise money for the Huntsman Cancer Foundation. (Incidentally, you can still give money here if you feel so inclined.) I got a really positive response from friends and family members, with eleven people donating a combined 395 dollars in my honor. The Friday after I signed up for this, however, I got back some troubling scans that indicated there were some unexplained nodules in my lungs that would have to be surgically removed and biopsied. I had the surgery last Friday and it went extremely well. The day after the surgery I was able to get up and walk more than a mile around the 5th floor of the Huntsman Cancer Hospital, which may be the best place in the world to recover from a surgery. By Monday I was able to leave the hospital. (They actually asked me if I wanted to try to leave Sunday, but I politely declined. The 5th floor is just too similar to a luxury hotel to want to check out early.) By that point it was clear that I would physically capable of walking a 5k by Thanksgiving, but the forecast called for a temperature of about 12 degrees, which is dangerous for someone recovering from lung surgery. I sought advice from the coordinators for the Huntsman Foundation and they told me that the Cottonwood Recreation Center (where the 5k was being held) has an indoor track. So this morning, Heather and I drove over there, picked up our shirts, and then did 50 laps on the very small indoor track while the rest of the runners actually ran the race outdoors. I would have preferred to complete the actual 5k, but since getting pneumonia really isn't an option right now, it was a nice way to still go through with my commitment to complete a 5k today. Thanks to Heather for coming along with me.

As it turns out, I got the pathology report for the nodules in my lung shortly before I left the hospital Monday. We're not sure exactly what they removed, but it was benign. In other words, my cancer hadn't spread. What an amazing blessing! I'm so grateful to essentially have another chance at life after an extremely difficult couple weeks. Thank you so much to the doctors and nurses at Huntsman for taking such good care of me. Thank you to my family and friends for being so supportive during such a difficult time. Finally, a particular thanks to my dad for being there when we were first told about the scans, when we finally got the pathology report, and at every moment in between, and a particular thanks to Heather for spending the first weekend of her Thanksgiving break nursing me back to health in the hospital.

The 4th of July

As a patriotic American with some great memories from the 4th of July, I look forward to it quite a bit each year. In future years, it will have the added significance of marking the anniversary of the day that I found my cancer had come back. Around 1:35 pm on July 4, 2010, I was sitting on the couch in my living room. As I ran my fingers along the skin below my ear and right at the end of the jaw, I felt a lump that was maybe the size of a large grape. I had no doubt what it was. We had some visitors over, but I rather abruptly stood up and left to go find my dad in his office at school where he was doing some work. As he has done throughout this whole process, he took care of the practical component of the problem and managed to get me an appointment at Huntsman for 2 days later, which is particularly impressive since they were closed on the 5th in observance of the 4th.

I'm particularly grateful that I've had him to take care of logistics since it has meant that I can deal with the unwelcome news in the best way I know how: escaping to the mountains. My brother Eli and I had hiked part way up White Pine earlier that summer before I had to turn around to make it to work, but we had seen enough that I knew I wanted to go back there to camp. We made a quick stop at REI so that I could grab a second sleeping bag for Eli and then started hiking around 6:30. We found a great spot a couple miles in:



We had a delicious dinner of Annie's Mac and Cheese and then crawled into my beautiful new tent and read by headlamp for a while. It really was a lovely spot and a good way to escape from a tough day.

The next morning we got up bright and early at 10:30 or so and had some oatmeal before heading up to the real attraction: White Pine Lake. It took us a while to get there, partially because we weren't as well equipped as we could have been to handle the snowfield we had to cross:



Incidentally, the ridge line that you can see in the background is the Little Cottonwood/Big Cottonwood ridge. In particular, the two high points on it right next to each other on the left side are the Broads Fork Twins, which I would climb 4 weeks later with Matt. One of the coolest parts of hiking all over the Wasatch was really getting a since of how it all fits together. I've always loved those mountains, but now I really know them much better.

The lake itself was pretty awesome. There was still a lot of snow and ice in it even though we were there on July 5th:



We headed down by a different route than we took up. That was a painful lesson in bushwhacking and common sense. One lesson that I relearned: if you're not sure how far you've actually traveled, you almost certainly haven't gone as far as you think. Anyway, my poor navigation skills led to this bit of bushwhacking:

I should point out that Eli and I had just emerged from the thick brush directly behind him. He was a total trooper about it which made me feel much better about getting into that mess. That said, he was glad to get back to the trail, which we intercepted not too far below where we had camped the night before:

All said and done, it was a great escape to one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, and it really couldn't have been better timed. Thanks to Eli for coming along with me and being such a trooper.

Ski Time!

Snowbird opened earlier than planned this year, which was awesome for me since I'm scheduled to have surgery this week. I got to ski both days this weekend and felt much stronger than I have in a while. The visibility up at Snowbird was pretty questionable yesterday, particularly since they had enough snow machines running to consistently create clouds of snow that iced up my goggles. That said, the snow was surprisingly consistent, so I ended up rocketing around and just trusting that my feet would cooperate. (They did.) The whole experience was so exhilarating for a couple reasons. First, I am firmly convinced that merely being outside in the mountains is good for my soul. This was my first trip up Little Cottonwood Canyon in a while, and it provided a nice reminder of why this blog has its name. Second, fighting cancer and managing the side effects of ipilimumab amounts to spending a lot of time dealing with your own body causing problems and making you sick. There's something empowering about taking my uncooperative body and forcing it to carry out precision commands to go flying down the mountain. Every time I get to show that I'm still in charge I achieve a small victory.

I prefer to include photos in these posts, but all I have from skiing Saturday is a hazy cell phone pic looking across Big Emma from about half way up Gadzoom. Still very pretty though:

Inspiration From Lance Armstrong

I saw this a year or two ago, long before it held any kind of personal significance for me. It popped into my mind today, so I spent a few minutes digging it up. Watching it again was moving for me, especially now that I know it's really hard to bravely declare "I'll beat this disease" in the face of terrifying odds.



What an amazing man. He certainly aimed higher than I am: while I am just as determined to beat cancer as he, I make no claims about returning to professional cycling when I'm done.

Edit: no guarantees that this link will keep working, but take a peak here too.

This Could Have Been Written By Me

But it wasn't:



(From postsecret.com)

Ski Season Approaches

I've been really looking forward to ski season this year. If I'm going to be at home instead of at school, I may as well take advantage of one of the best things about Utah. Well, it looks like it's about to get a whole lot closer:

What It Means to be a Cancer Patient

A bizarre little controversy has bubbled up in the NBA. Charlie Villanueva, a player who has no hair due to an autoimmune condition, posted a tweet claiming that Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics called him a "cancer patient." I'm not that interested in the controversy- my only thought is that Lance Armstrong is all the more impressive for achieving what he has after being a cancer patient- but it illustrates something that's been on my mind recently. Cancer doesn't make you lose your hair; chemotherapy does. So much of our conception of what it means to be a cancer patient is based on the experience of going through chemotherapy. Certainly that was my understanding until last March.

In some bizarre way, I've felt that my cancer experience has been less legitimate since I haven't had to go through the hell of chemotherapy. (This has changed a bit as I've developed some miserable side effects in the last week, but I'm still not physically suffering on that same level.) This feeling is all the more perverse when you consider that I'm not going through chemo because melanoma doesn't respond to it, which makes it that much more dangerous. More to the point, the emotional toll of dealing with cancer- the uncertainty, the despair, the fear, the anxiety, the worry, and so on- is more than enough to legitimize anyone's experience, regardless of the physical challenges they face. I don't mean to make light of the physical challenges that cancer patients go through. But in my experience, the devastating part about feeling intensely sick is the ensuing sense of helplessness and despair. The physical pain only adds to the emotional agony.

In light of this, the mark of a cancer patient isn't losing one's hair or vomiting or anything that simple. A cancer patient is someone who is confronted with pain, fear, and uncertainty and somehow finds a way to keep going, perhaps because there isn't any other choice. I understand that Villanueva is sensitive about his condition, but at the end of the day being called a "cancer patient" was a tremendous compliment.

Description of Ipilimumab

I came across this article while poking around online today, and I think it's a fantastic overview of all things ipilimumab, which is the drug I'm on right now.

The Miracle of Modern Medicine

When I was diagnosed with stage II melanoma last March, there were no effective systemic treatments for melanoma. Three months later, when I found out that my melanoma had returned as a stage III disease, that had changed. In early June, researchers at Bristol-Myers Squibb announced that they had completed a successful trial of a drug known as ipilimumab. For the first time in thousands of years of human history, we now have a way to treat late stages an incredibly dangerous disease. Every time I think of the miraculous timing of that announcement I feel more than a little overwhelmed. I'm currently in a clinical trial testing ipi (as it is known), and I am incredibly grateful to have that chance.

The Beginning of a Journey

I ended up spending the summer of 2010 back home in Utah. Although I was disappointed not to be doing an internship or taking classes or doing something like that, I was excited to take advantage of living only moments away from my beloved Wasatch Mountains. Although a seven month long sinus infection followed by a very stressful spring semester had taken its toll on my physical conditioning, I resolved to get out and hike as much as possible. I did so. One of my first hikes of the year was up Mill B North on May 25, which was the day after the latest snow ever in the Salt Lake Valley. The view looking at the Cottonwood ridge line was great:



I also got a good look up the Mill B South drainage. You get a decent view of Sundial Peak:



A month later, I got a much closer view of Sundial Peak when I hiked Lake Blanche on the summer solstice:

I tried to make a Summer Solstice snow angel since opportunities to do so are few and far between, but I think it ended up looking more like a devil:



I also spent some time hiking up White Pine as well as camping in Southern Utah with and up Bell's Canyon, but if I posted all the pictures I want to I'll never get to then end of this post. Suffice it to say that I was hiking a few times a week and should have been getting stronger but I wasn't.

On July 2 I hiked up Mill D North, past Lake Desolation, and over the ridge line into Bear Trap Fork with a friend. Throughout the day I was much slower than she was and constantly found myself trying to catch up with her. At one point I shared the thought that kept crossing my mind: my weakness was a sign that my melanoma had come back. After the first surgery I had at the end of March, each time I felt weak or tired I wondered if it was a sign that the cancer was coming back. She did the right thing and tried her best to convince me otherwise, but unfortunately I was right. Two days later, on the 4th of July, I found a lump in my neck that would turn my life upside down.

This blog is the story of my ongoing struggle with melanoma and the ways in which I've done my best to hold on to at least part of my life. Much of it is personal, so you won't see me advertising this very much. But as I've gone through the process of dealing with cancer, I have frequently been inspired by the stories of other cancer patients and survivors. In turn, then, I feel like I should share my story in the hope that it might inspire someone else.