One Family, One Year, One Incredible Chain of Events

2013 is a year that David and Christine Chenail of Brooklyn, CT will never forget. 

Theirs is a story that makes people gape and say, “What are the odds?!” But it wasn’t a question they themselves could even think about at the time. The chain of events that befell them that year is almost unbelievable. But what’s even more impressive is how they pushed through, together, to quite literally become one in a million.

David and Christine were both just 47 years old and still raising their two young boys, Devin, 11 and Daniel, 8, when in the span of just 12 short months they each faced colon cancer. 

In that year, they went through four surgeries, four hospital stays and 6 months of chemotherapy between them. And as though that weren’t enough, there were a couple of other very unpleasant surprises along the way.

The beginning of their longest year...

It all began in the spring of 2013, when David and Christine were about to head out for a long-anticipated family vacation to Arizona. David, who works third shift in the tool room at the Gillette manufacturing plant in Boston, was feeling a little run-down and remembers thinking something might be wrong. 

“But I had just started working third shift, so I thought maybe it was that,” he recalls. “And I didn’t want to see the doctor before our trip and end up having to miss it. So we went.”

David struggled with dizziness and felt faint throughout the trip. 

“I remember when we were at the Grand Canyon, I was feeling awful and we could see buzzards circling overhead, and we joked they were just waiting for me to drop,” he says. But beneath the humor was real worry. 

David’s chest was hurting as he walked through the canyon and he thought he may have a blockage in his heart. He planned to make an appointment at Gillette’s on-site medical facility as soon as he returned to work.

At his appointment, the doctor suspected that David was anemic, and ran some tests. David headed home, exhausted and planning to head straight to bed. But by the time he’d reached home, the doctor was already calling to tell him the tests had come back and that he had to get to the ER right away – he was severely anemic.

“I went to the Emergency Department at Day Kimball Hospital and saw Dr. Wexler,” David says. “I remember the nurses couldn’t even find a vein because I was so anemic, and Dr. Wexler said, ‘You realize you’re going to need a room at the inn tonight.’”

David was admitted for what he thought would be a short stay. But by the time he left 10 days later, his and his family’s lives were forever changed. The first in a long series of health battles had begun.

David received a blood transfusion for the anemia, a full six pints of blood. “They told me normally you would be dead after losing that much blood, but I had lost it so slowly that my body compensated,” he says. But what was causing the blood loss?

An endoscopy and colonoscopy were scheduled, and by Monday David had his answer: colon cancer. A large tumor, measuring roughly 4.5 by 2 inches, was discovered.

“When I woke up from the biopsy, that’s when they told me,” David says. “It was like a dream. All I could think was ‘this can’t be happening to me.’”

From Christine’s perspective, the experience was the same. 

“They told me first, before David woke up,” she says. “When Dave was first diagnosed, that was really hard for me. We went back to his room afterwards and the loss we felt, the wondering where to go… I remember leaving the hospital, just thinking ‘what do we do now?’  I’m a planner, a ‘Type A’ personality, and I was just at such a loss because I had no idea what to do.”

At 11:30 that night, Christine called the hospital to check on David. 

“I called the nurses’ station to check on him, and when I called I said, I just have so many questions and I don’t know where to turn. The nurse that answered was so great – I can’t say enough about the nurses at Day Kimball, and the treatment they gave both Dave and me. She stayed on the phone and reassured me. She said I should talk with the hospitalist the next day and made note of my questions to pass along.”

“I didn’t even know what a hospitalist was at the time – that there are doctors at the hospital whose only focus is to care for inpatients while they’re there,” Christine says. “But Dr. Ramzen, our hospitalist during David’s stay, was there to talk with us the next morning. We got a lot of answers from him that day, and it was so helpful.”

That guidance was crucial. Though David had only just been diagnosed, time was of the essence; he and Christine had to make a decision about the next step in his care right away.

The big decision – “Should I stay, or should I go?”

 “The doctors at the hospital were very good to us when we told them we needed some time to decide,” David recalls. “I reached out to my primary care doctor at the time, at the Gillette medical center, and my primary offered to set up a time for me to meet with someone from Dana Farber about receiving treatment there, if I wanted.”

At the time David had a close friend who had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was being treated at Dana Farber, so he says he thought about it, but wanted to talk to the doctors at Day Kimball first.

“With this type of thing I’m thinking there’s going to be a lot of follow-up. I already commute from Brooklyn to Boston every day, I don’t need to spend more time on the road, and have to hang out in Boston after work for check-ups and all that, especially when I’m sick. I just don’t need it,” he says.

So, he met with Dr. Ronald Franzino, a general surgeon with Day Kimball Medical Group who’s practiced at Day Kimball Hospital for more than 20 years.

“He met with me in the patient lounge at the hospital,” David says. “He told me I needed to have a colon resection, and that he did them quite often and was very experienced, plus the hospital rated well nationally and had a great record for the procedure. 

He said to me, ‘Your friend’s cancer is something we don’t treat here. If that were the case for you, we would send you to Dana Farber or somewhere else. But we do treat this here, and we can take very good care of you,’” David recalls. “I really respected his candor.”

David and his son, Daniel, standing in front of David's 1971 Plymouth Duster at the Putnam Burnouts car show in August, 2013. David was still undergoing chemotherapy at the time. He shared a love of cars with his general surgeon, Dr. Franzino, who invited him to attend the show.

Dr. Franzino explained the procedure. David asked if he was going to have to have a colostomy bag after, fearful of the answer. 

“And Dr. Franzino, he has this great dry sense of humor, you know, and he says, ‘Well, if you want one, I’ll put one in.’ It took me a second to realize he was joking and that I wasn’t going to have a colostomy bag. He stayed and talked with me a bit more – we’re both into cars, so we even talked about that a little – and he just made Christine and I both feel so comfortable.”

After talking with Dr. Franzino, David says he thought about his past experience with the hospital over the years – he was born there, had been treated in the emergency department after a motorcycle accident, his kids were born there and had been treated there as well – and the experience had always been positive.

“My philosophy was, this is my local hospital, my good neighbor, right in my own community. Even in just those first few days that I’d been there after my diagnosis, everyone was great,” David says. “The pastor, Jonathan Scott, came in multiple times and sat with me. The nurses would bring snacks for the boys when they came to visit. You could just tell people cared. I felt comfortable going there to be treated.”

Because his cancer was going to require chemotherapy after the surgery, he also learned more about the Cancer Care Center at the hospital. He found out that he would receive the identical treatment procedures, medicines and care that he would receive at any of the larger hospitals, plus he’d have access to many supportive services during his chemo, and he would be close to home.

His decision was made.

On May 23, just six days after he’d first been admitted to the hospital, David had surgery to remove the portion of his colon where the cancer was located.

The long road ahead – and the unexpected bump in the journey.

“I was in pain when I woke up [from the surgery], like a knife jab in my side every so often,” David remembers. “I stayed in the hospital three or four days more, but after the first 24 hours I didn’t have pain like that again. Dr. Franzino called me at home to see how I was doing, and gave me his personal cell number, which I really appreciated. I did call him here and there with questions.”

Only three weeks after his colectomy, David underwent surgery again, this time to place a port in his chest through which his 24-week course of chemotherapy would be delivered. He’d have one treatment every other week, for a total of 12 treatments. 

The first treatment went well; David didn’t have any adverse effects or symptoms. But then he began having awful aches and pains, and running a fever. Was it the effects of chemo creeping in, or something else?

Christine took him to the ED to find the cause of his symptoms, and he was admitted.  He saw his new primary care doctor, Dr. O’Neill (he’d decided to switch to a local doctor, and Christine and their boys already were patients of Dr. O’Neill, who is a family medicine physician). Dr. O’Neill ran some tests and came back with a surprising and completely unrelated cause – ehrlichiosis, a bacterial disease transmitted through the bite of a tick.

David was in the hospital for another two days, followed by two weeks of antibiotic treatment. His second round of chemo had to be delayed.

And then the other shoe (that no one was expecting) dropped…

David and Christine on their 20th wedding anniversary in September, 2013.

Meanwhile, Christine was still shaken by David’s colon cancer diagnosis. 

“He was only 47 and had no family history,” she says. “I was also 47, but my grandfather had passed away from colon cancer and my dad had had polyps. I knew people usually don’t start having colonoscopies until they’re 50, but with my family history and all that David was going through, I decided to have one done just to be safe.”

As it turns out, Christine’s colonoscopy had been scheduled on one of the days when David was in the hospital for ehrlichiosis.

“She came to my room after she had it done,” David says, “and I asked how it went. The look on her face wasn’t good.”

A tumor, too large to be removed during the colonoscopy, had been discovered in Christine’s sigmoid colon.

“Dr. Franzino happened to be on the floor after my colonoscopy,” Christine recalls. “He came into my room immediately, while I was still in recovery, and scheduled my surgery right then and there. It was amazing. I can’t say enough wonderful things about that man.”

Christine’s surgery was originally scheduled for July 10, but the results of a pre-operative CT scan to profile the tumor came back inconclusive, and Dr. Franzino cancelled the surgery to investigate further. After a follow-up MRI, an ultrasound, and case review by the hospital’s tumor board, it was determined that the surgery should move ahead. Dr. Franzino removed Christine’s tumor on August 1.

“It turned out to be an adenoma – a benign pre-cancerous tumor,” Christine says, the relief still evident in her voice a year-and-a-half later. “But it was so large that, had I waited until 50 to have a colonoscopy, there’s a very good chance it would have turned to cancer before then.”

Christine stayed in the hospital for four days following her surgery. When she returned home, she picked right back up caring for David and the boys.

The chemo continues, as David suffers a painful loss and one more unexpected surgery.

As the summer wore on into fall, David fell into a familiar pattern with his treatments.

“I kept a good rhythm,” he says. “I’d go in to the oncology unit on Tuesday and they’d send me home with a portable pump to deliver the chemo into the port in my chest over the next couple of days. I’d go back on Thursday to have it removed – it only took about 20 minutes – and then I’d be free for the next week. I’d go to the Day Kimball lab on Green Hollow in Danielson the next Monday to have my bloodwork done, and by the time I was back in the oncology unit on Tuesday morning, they’d already know if I could get my next round of chemo or not – they have quite a system there. And then the process would repeat itself.”

David says that with the support of the hospital’s Cancer Care Center staff, his treatment side effects were minimal. 

“I never vomited, never lost my hair. I got a little tired toward the end, but I was able to do some stuff around the yard on my chemo off-weeks,” he says. “My oncologist at Day Kimball, Dr. Kapur, said I fared very well. The oncology team – from Theresa, the nurse navigator, to Cheryl, the dietitian, Abby, the social worker who hosted the support groups, and Sharon and Sue, two of the nurses… They were all great and really worked as a team.”

In October, David’s friend who had been battling pancreatic cancer passed away. “I had been trying to keep him upbeat through it all, but it was a tough struggle for him, and then he was gone. That was really tough,” he says.

Shaken by the loss of his friend, David continued on with his own chemo treatments. But he noticed he had developed a bump at the site of his surgery and was having pain there as well. Dr. Franzino diagnosed him with an incisional hernia, a result of the colectomy surgery, but decided that chemo was enough for David to deal with at one time. Surgery for the hernia was postponed until the spring.

David had his last chemo treatment on December 10, 2013. Surgery for his incisional hernia was performed on April 20, 2014, exactly 11 months after the colonoscopy that diagnosed his colon cancer.

It had been one hell of a year.

Now “one in a million,” the Chenails are still looking back, but are also moving on.

After a roller-coaster ride of a year, David and Christine happily celebrate their 21st wedding anniversary in September, 2014.

About 16 months after his last chemo treatment, David is still cancer free, although a pre-cancerous polyp was discovered and removed at his one-year follow up colonoscopy. He has to have regular bloodwork and CT scans to monitor his remission, along with a colonoscopy every two years.

But he is now officially “one in a million” – one of the one million colon cancer survivors in the United States today. And that’s the message that he and Christine want their story to convey – that colon cancer is survivable. And, that it is preventable.

“I’m one that never wanted to go to the doctor,” David says. “My parents were never ones for doctors either… Who wants to go to the doctor? So I’d only go when I was sick – preventive care wasn’t too much on my mind. But I could have foregone all of this if I had been able to catch the polyp early.”

“Now I’m coming up on 50, my buddies are all complaining about having to have their first colonoscopy,” he continues. “I thought I still had time before I needed to get screened, when I already had cancer. There wasn’t much I could’ve done about that, but had I been going to the doctor regularly, maybe the anemia would have been noticed sooner. Who knows? But there are lots of people who are in that age range where they’re supposed to be getting a colonoscopy, and they’re not. They should.”

And though life in the Chenail home has largely returned to normal – David is back at work at Gillette and Christine is busy as ever with the kids and their boy scout troop – they say it is still forever changed.

The Chenails pay much more attention to their health now – the entire family’s nutrition, exercise and habits. And they are grateful for the one gift their ordeal has given them – the ability to be proactive for their boys. David is seeing a geneticist to determine his risk for other cancers, as well as to determine hereditary risks for the boys. Regardless, because of their parents’ experiences, their doctor has recommended both Devin and Daniel have their first colonoscopy at age 19.

“That’s the one good thing,” Christine says. “Now that we know, it could save our boys’ lives.”

Special Alert: