Johns Hopkins Medicine Liver Cancer Patient Goes The Distance

You can recover from the pain of your surgery, but the sort of mental diagnosis of having cancer is, sort of, you deal with that, I think, every day. Running for me has always been and has become more of a kind of a mental therapy. This is probably my tenth marathon that I'm gonna run today. My name is Marvin Leventer. Four years ago I had intermittent abdominal pain. It seemed to be after eating certain foods I'd end up like -- I'd end up on the couch, crawled up in a ball in pain for hours. So then after about the third and a little urging from my wife, she's like, well, maybe you should just go to the doctor. I ended up doing the biopsy. So the biopsy of my liver came back as liver cancer. And they were gonna do surgery for it and I figured, you know, I should get a second opinion and maybe a third opinion. So I went for a second opinion. You know, I knew Hopkins was kind of right here, so I went for my third opinion and I had to choose. It was pretty clear to me that Doctor Pawlik was gonna be the best person, you know, out of all three. When I met Mr. Leventer he had been given the diagnosis of liver cancer. He actually had a neuroendocrine tumor of the pancreas that had spread to his liver. This was very important because the therapy for Mr. Leventer now would substantially change based on this new diagnosis. Because of the extent of the disease Mr. Leventer would need two operations rather than one. We performed the first surgery and at that time I removed the entire right side of his liver and removed all of the disease in it. And then after about four to six weeks when Mr. Leventer had recovered from the first operation, I took him back to the operating room again. And at the time of the second surgery I removed all the residual disease in his left liver and then also performed the Whipple operation which involves removing part of the pancreas, the bile duct, and some of the small intestine. I had sort of a dream of mine was to do an ironman distance triathlon. So I'm thinking, okay, I'm gonna get through all these, that's what I'm gonna do, but as soon as I can, I started walking, I started moving, and it took me a while, probably several months before I could run again. So my first marathon was about a year and a half afterwards. I did the Baltimore marathon. Mr. Leventer recovered quite well after the operation. As most patients do, after a few weeks' period of time people can get back to their normal routines. Clearly, Mr. Leventer is in outlier, he's running marathons, and doing ironman. But I think he stands in as example that many patients who have major operations for cancer can expect not only to return to their normal activities but can expect to lead a fruitful and happy life after many of these operations. Life is actually better now than it was beforehand coz I look at the big picture and it's good and I run more, I swim more, I bike more. I'm probably physically healthier and better off I was before my surgery. Mentally, I'm better off. And so every day for me, everyday, basically, is a good day. Every day is really -- everyday is a great day.