Esophageal Cancer Support Monthly Meeting

Education is everything. With all the knowledge we possess today, why people still smoke or chew is beyond me

I tried to register and it says meeting is over but it is not happening until 21st?

I feel I MUST say this. My brother, retired from the Marines at 45, had esophageal cancer. He stopped smoking years and years ago and then went to smokeless tobacco. Back in the latter part of 2020, they scraped his esophagus and doctor said the outcome looked very promising. He called the doctor complaining of pain and the doctor told him he shouldn't be having any pain. He wound up in the hospital and when they inserted the chest tube, pus rushed out through the tube. He had a MAJOR infection. He was in the hospital over Christmas. They were waiting on a bed at Shands in Gainesville FL. After 3 days, they had one so he was sent to Shands. He told us he had to be on a soft food diet for a month. Well, come to find out, he had told my younger sister that he wasn't. She told him that his esophagus was so thin that if he ate anything with texture to it, it would go through his esophagus straight into his chest cavity, to which my brother replied "OH"......He coded twice while in ICU and the doctor told his son that if he coded again, they could bring him back but that he wouldn't be the same. TJ was standing by the bed when they were going to get him up to sit in chair and Tony said "I can't breathe" and his eyes rolled and that was it. I talked with him through chat at 10:30. At 1:30 he was gone. It was January 3rd, 2021. It is so, so important to follow the doctors orders. We, the rest of family, think if he had, he would still be here. We found out later that he was eating corn nuts, nachos, basically anything he wanted, from the time he got home from having esophagus scraped. It created a hole and from then on, everything he ate or drank went into his chest cavity instead of his stomach. If only he had done as he was told. He would have been 57 the 22nd of January. He was the 4th sibling and 1 of 2 brothers. We miss him so much. ❤️