About Us
Halina and I met in Kelowna, BC in the early 90’s and got married shortly after. Work during those early years had me traveling a lot which in turn meant moving around from province to province. Edmonton Alberta was our first stop and then Kingston Ontario for about 8 years. There our two sons finished their high school and Jake, the oldest, enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces while Nick decided to return to Kelowna and pursue an education in Computer Science.
At this point I was traveling to Alberta for work and the flights were getting expensive so we decided to return with our son and settle back in the Central Okanagan area. So we purchased a travel trailer, sold our house and in August of 2015 we made the long cross country drive.
Work was a rotation of one week in camp and one week at home, this seemed to work for us as it gave us a lot of time to spend with each other when I was home. We started to make plans for the future although not specific we did envision ourselves buying a sailboat and sailing the open oceans for a period of time and felt that setting a date for spring of 2022 was pretty do-able and also gave a date to shoot for since we seemed to keep procrastinating about this in the past.
Dec 27, 2019 was Halina’s 59th birthday and we made reservations to spend two weeks in Mexico and experience New Years away from home. This holiday was amazing, the time went by too fast as usual and we found ourselves back home in winter before we knew it. In January Halina had gone in for a biopsy on her tongue at the Kelowna General Hospital.
In February 2020 both Halina and I had an appointment with our Optometrist, I went first and found I had no changes which meant no new glasses to get used to, which was fine with me. Halina went in a short time later and I sat in the waiting room looking at some way overpriced sunglasses that I wish I had the money for when in came the Dr and said my wife was asking for me. As I entered the room I noticed she was crying, at first I thought something was wrong with her mother, not sure why that popped into my head but realized this was not the issue. She looked at me and said, "It's F_ing CANCER!"
I didn't know what to say, I was numb, speechless and scared,
needless to say we left the Dr's office right away and went home. A few days later we received a call for an appointment with a surgeon to go over the options, I must say that I was pretty optimistic at this point that we may need to do some chemotherapy and that would be it and she would be back to her old self in no time.
February 24th we met with our surgeon and pretty much right away we received the bad news of what was to happen with Halina. The diagnosis was, "Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma" (ACC) which had developed on the base of the tongue. Because Chemotherapy or Radiation have little to no effect on this type of rare cancer the surgeon told us that the best chance of getting rid of the cancer was to totally remove the tongue with some outlying areas in the mouth.
This news took us both by shock, we had gone in there with the anticipated result of maybe going through Chemotherapy but now the reality of the situation was starting to sink in and we were speechless. The above picture shows the surgeon using a probe to go in and look at the base of the tongue to confirm the location and size of the tumor.
Halina's decision was either have the surgery and live a cancer free life or don't have the surgery and risk having the cancer spread to the lungs or brain thus resulting in palliative care and a much shorter life.
This website was put together to chronicle Halina's journey from her surgery through her recovery process and to show what was involved in helping her transition to this new way of life.
Follow our blogs for stories on her journey and feel free to contact us or leave comments. We are both willing to answer any questions and for those who are going through or are about to go through something similar and you wish to chat we are always happy to help in any way possible.
Stay strong and know there is always someone out there willing to help and support during these tough times!