William Brtis knows a little something about overcoming the odds after getting devastating medical news, and he has some simple advice for others: Avoid fear.
“The one thing, and I did think about this, is just don’t be afraid,” he said. “Fear is the worst thing against you.”
The Oak Forest resident had good cause to be afraid. He was diagnosed in early 2023 at Northwestern Medicine Palos Hospital in Palos Park with an aggressive form of bladder cancer known as muscle-invasive high-grade urothelial carcinoma after noticing blood in his urine. Just six days later, he learned he also had right lung adenocarcinoma, a type of lung cancer.
“That kind of scared me. My mind was thinking, ‘If they find it in two places, why not three, four or five?’ And also I was thinking, ‘Did it go from my bladder and to my lungs?’ And I was thinking about the liver and certain other things that happen a lot,” Brtis recalled.
It’s “not common” to have two types of cancer at the same time, said Dr. Yazan Numan, medical oncologist at the Northwestern Medicine St. George Cancer Institute in Orland Park. He added that 5% of patients get diagnosed with two cancers, but it’s typically those who have a family history of cancer or a genetic disposition for it.
Although Brtis’ father and his sister Marilyn both survived colon cancer, the disease was not caused by genetics.
“I was worried because I’ve got five brothers and five sisters,” he said. “It turned out that it’s not (genetic).”
Brtis’ lung cancer was discovered during testing for the bladder cancer. “Part of the workup for the bladder cancer is to do CAT scans of the chest, and when we did that, there was something suspicious in the lung,” Numan explained.
“It makes it a more complicated case because … each cancer is treated differently and different treatments cannot be mixed together, so that’s the way you have to become innovative,” he said.
The first stage of treatment was to surgically remove the mass on Brtis’ bladder followed by several weeks of chemotherapy. That treatment had limited success, so in May 2023, Dr. Joshua Meeks, a urologist at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, removed Brtis’ bladder and prostate.
Next, it was time to treat his lung cancer, which was done with radiation and chemotherapy starting in August 2023, followed by immunotherapy treatments in early 2024. Those were expected to continue through September 2024 but scans in June showed the lung cancer was gone so immunotherapy could be stopped early.
“Immunotherapy is essentially an immune booster that stimulates the immune system so it kills the cancer for us,” Numan explained. “It is certain proteins that we are using that stimulate the immune system. Our body is designed with a system to kill cancer, but in some patients it is not working quite right.”
Numan was pleased with how well Brtis did with treatment. “It’s really exciting because dealing with one cancer is a tough fight in the first place, so beating two cancers is even harder. It’s really rewarding to see. It’s a joint effort – me as an oncologist and the radiation oncologist and the surgical team. It was hard work.”
He said Brtis will need scans every three months but is considered in remission. “We’re still watching things closely for him, making sure his cancer doesn’t come back.”
Keeping an eye on his progress during treatment was as easy as seeing his doctor. “I started to learn just by looking at his face how I am,” Brtis explained. “The doctor comes into the room with me and he’s got this big old smile on his face. There was only one time he came in there not smiling. That made me nervous.”
Although he took several weeks off recovering after the bladder removal surgery, his weekly rounds of chemotherapy and daily radiation barely bothered Brtis. “I basically was able to go straight to work right afterward,” he said, adding that he would stop at Burger King for a hamburger and head home to get dressed before driving to his job as a second shift forklift operator at RJW Logistics in Lockport. “I would do that every Wednesday after chemo. It kind of turned into a ritual. And I was told by somebody that the chemotherapy actually did make you hungry.”
He credited siblings Danny, Marilyn and Peggy for helping him through his fear after the twin diagnoses and caring for him in the early days. “They basically took charge of me and took care of my bills and everything to do with me. And also to get my head right about this,” he said. “I honestly wasn’t afraid of the cancer after talking with them.”
Brtis said staying positive – and playing mind games with himself that everything was perfect – kept him going, although his side effects were very mild. “I would be talking to the nurses, and I think that’s where I started teasing them about ‘You’re not putting chemo in me. You’re putting water in me.”
He did, however, lose his eyelashes. “They started itching so I guess I must have rubbed them out, but they’re back in and I think they’re a lot longer than they were,” he said. “I got them back real quick. It surprised me that they were there because I was looking through them!”
Ending the immunotherapy treatments early came as a total surprise. “They shocked me with that – that I’m to stop that,” he said. “But the reason for it was the cancer in the lungs, the white spots, they disappeared. They were totally gone!”
He won’t forget the medical staff he met during treatment, especially the nurses. “They were wonderful how they treated me. The nurses in the chemo, the nurses in the radiation, they all became friends,” he said.
When Brtis started learning how to play the guitar, one of the nurses started teasing him, calling him rock star. “It was kind of a joke between me and her because I started calling her Shania Twain. She sort of looked like her,” he said. Brtis now has a permanent reminder of their teasing because when she signed a congratulatory note from most of the nurses about him beating cancer, she used that moniker above her actual name.
He called Numan and all his medical staff “wonderful,” adding “It’s the only word I can think of that is good enough to relate to them.”
Melinda Moore is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
