How it all began...

A few weeks before Beau was to race in the season-opening ARCA race at Daytona, he coughed up some blood which led him to get a chest x-ray.  There was a lesion on his right lung which prompted the doctors to do a CT scan where they determined that Beau had an AV malformation (essentially a tangle of veins that have become swollen or blown up).  On Tuesday, January 27th, Beau went into the hospital to have a "simple" procedure done to correct this small problem.  When the doctor went in to repair the veins using a cath, they couldn't get the dye to run through the tangled mass which lead them to believe it had to be something other than an AV malformation.  The only thing left to do was open Beau up and take the mass out to find out what it actually was.  The next morning, Beau went into surgery at 6:30 am and the doctor ended up removing the entire upper lobe of his right lung.  There was a 7 cm tumor fully encapsulated inside the lobe and it was sent to pathology for further analysis.  Beau remained in the hospital for a full week after the surgery with no word from pathology.  Two days after he went home and ten days after the surgery, Beau's doctor came out to the house to tell us that his tumor was a rare form of soft-tissue sarcoma called Synovial Sarcoma.  He said that they had been reluctant to call the diagnosis until they ran a DNA test to be 100% sure of the type of sarcoma that it was.  

We immediately began discussing options for Beau and M.D. Anderson in Houston, TX was brought up over and over again.  If you are not familiar with M.D. Anderson, it is the cancer research hospital at the University of Texas and is considered the absolute best place to be for cancer treatment of any kind.  Beau went to M.D. Anderson last week along with Buster(dad), Jeanne(mom) and Jessica(girlfriend) to meet with Dr. Robert Benjamin, the chair of the Sarcoma Medical Oncology Department.  He suggested that Beau begin chemotherapy as soon as possible to aggressively treat the cancer.  In the mean-time, Beau had a CT Scan and a PET Scan to make sure there were no other tumors in his body.  Luckily, the scans came back clear...normally, Synovial Sarcoma begins somewhere else and metastasizes to the lung or elsewhere, so Beau was fortunate to have only had the one tumor in his lung.  Beau will be beginning chemo this week at M.D. Anderson and will have to stay there for at least two cycles that are 21 days each.  After those two cycles, the Dr. Benjamin will decide if Beau can come back to Georgia and take the treatments at Emory if he chooses to do so.  

Please pray for Beau to be able to tolerate the side effects of chemo as well as he possibly can.

Also, we would like to thank Sam and Dave Mosley for allowing our family the use of their house as long as Beau has to be out in Houston. 

Thank you for following Beau on this journey and for the many prayers that we know are being lifted up on his behalf!