Andrew Bisaga

Speaker: Andrew Bisaga , Sarcoma Patient

Andrew Bisaga : Hi, my name is Andrew Bisaga. I'm currently 21 years old, but when I was 12 years old back in 2017, I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in my proximal right femur. Kind of the way I even found out about it was, I was really active at the time. I was playing football, and I kind of noticed this pain in my right leg, that kind of wouldn't go away. Initially, it had been written off as kind of a hernia, or maybe a muscle pull or something like that. But once I kind of woke up in the middle of the night in pain, that's when my parents kind of started to take it more serious. I got an X-ray done and they found the mass, and that's when I went in for a biopsy, and they diagnosed me with osteosarcoma. In terms of treatment, it was pretty straightforward. I got the standard MAP chemotherapy treatment, so that's just, doxorubicin, cisplatinin, and methotrexate. I started that in the fall of 2017. Went through about six or eight months of chemotherapy, and I finished up in about July. So yeah, and then I had pretty great margins for tumor necrosis, so I was declared NED the summer of 2018, and I have been since. I'm very glad, very happy to be cancer free for about, I think it's about eight years now, give or take. In terms of kind of the surgery I went through, I had a limb salvage surgery, so they were able to keep my leg, especially since it was so close to kind of my hip area. Amputation really was kind of a, if we need to, we can, but let's make that the last-ditch effort. So I had a limb salvage surgery about halfway through my treatment, so sometime in January. I got a compression prosthetic done over at Rush Orthopedics. That came with a pretty hefty recovery time. I was non-weight bearing for maybe six months, and then, kind of progressively, they just told me I could put more and more weight on it. I still kind of have, I'm left with a limp, but for the most part, I get to keep 80% of my leg. So I am pretty glad that I didn't have to amputate or do anything like that. So yeah, now, kind of just dealing, I had to do some PT for a few years after that just to get the muscles back in check. But right now, I'm kinda back to being somewhat active, which I'm very happy with. That was kind of one of the pros with my prosthetic. I'd still be able to kind of, apart from tackling people and football, I was still able to kind of maintain some of my activity. So yeah, but eight years cancer free, and that's about it. Now I'm going to college and loving life, so.

Andrew Bisaga : Yeah, so if I had to give one piece of advice to somebody who's newly diagnosed, I'd say just you'll never get answers to the questions that you don't ask. So if you have a question about why they're giving you certain treatment, what other options are there, just any information you want, you gotta ask for it, right? Or you gotta go seek it out from somewhere. I think where I kind of identify with this the most is when I was choosing my prosthetic, my surgeon had really kind of pushed the idea of a cemented rod on me. He said that's your best option. It's gonna get you, it has the quickest recovery time, it's gonna be really stable, so you'll be able to kind of, it'll take more force. You can be more kind of reckless with it, or be more active and be more hard on it, intense in your activity, and you'll be fine. But he said, eventually, that cement is gonna wear away that bone and we'll have to go in and do some revisions in the future. And I had always thought, as a kid, I was like, I'm young, I don't wanna be getting revisions every five or 10 years, so I figured there's gotta be another option. So my parents took me to different surgeons and they give me different prosthetic options. There was a cadaver, which was another kind of good option, kind of that keeping that similar bone element, that was one. And then I went to, and I went and found my compression prosthetic from a different surgeon, and I took that back to my original surgeon, and he said, oh yeah, that's another great option, I've got a guy who can do that, which, I was thinking like, I wish you'd just give me that option initially. But either way, if I had just said, OK, sounds good, then I would be dealing with a surgical option that I wasn't really happy with, right? I would've been doing all these revisions to kinda make sure that that joint was stable. But now, I only, should only have to have one revision. I'll have to have a kind of a hip replacement-esque surgery sometime in my 30s. But apart from dealing with kind of a lengthy recovery time to make sure the bone properly grew around the prosthetic, which was another one of the downsides, probably kind of why my surgeon didn't tell me about that, because he was kind of worried about something happening during that about year-long recovery process that would screw up the healing. But regardless, I was fine with that. That was something where I was willing to take that initial cost and, for the chance of less revisions. So all this to say, if you don't ask or if you don't seek out different options, make sure that you can get all the information you can when making big decisions, especially like surgery. You only know what you know, so the more you can go out, to the best of your ability, and go out and find different information, the better. I'll never be afraid to ask another question.