John Sodeika was a healthy, active 51-year-old husband and father with two daughters in high school. He loved the outdoors and had just gotten promoted to his dream job at work. But then he started having stomach problems.
“At first, you think ‘Okay, it’s a little heartburn.’ When it finally felt like it was time to get it checked out, it was too late,” Sodeika says. The bad news, which he received in 2019, was a diagnosis of stage 4 stomach cancer that had spread to his liver and lymph nodes. His prognosis was grim. He was told he likely had less than a year to live.
“It was a shock. I had been thinking, no big deal. It’s going to be some little cyst or something benign,” recalls Sodeika, who works as a product development director at orthopedic device manufacturer Arthrex in Naples. “Then you wind up hearing, ‘This is terminal, incurable, inoperable. It’s treatable — we can try to prolong your life. We need to hit you really hard with chemo and try to slow it down and buy you as much time as possible. But it’s incurable.’”
He stayed optimistic and started undergoing chemotherapy at a Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute location near Naples. (The practice has nearly 100 locations.) At the same time, he got a second opinion at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he regularly got scans and consulted with an oncologist.
After 26 treatments, a CT scan at MD Anderson showed that the chemotherapy had started failing and the cancer was spreading again. “At that point, they (MD Anderson) didn’t have anything for me as far as clinical trials go. One of the things that I learned is you have to be unbelievably lucky to wind up with a trial being available at the time that you need it.”
However, it turned out that Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute did have a clinical trial that he qualified for at the practice’s Drug Development Unit in Sarasota. The 2020 trial involved using immunotherapy on solid GI tumors. Previously it had mostly been used on lung and skin cancers. “At the time, this was quite unique,” Sodeika says. Immunotherapy is now in increasingly widespread use.
In a couple of months, his cancer was under control. At six months, his cancer was dormant, and his PET scans came back clean. He kept doing immunotherapy until he started getting gastrointestinal side effects.
“I’m very blessed, and now I’m in no man’s land,” Sodeika says. “My doctors just monitor me, and we hope it doesn’t come back.”
Today he’s off treatment and living a normal life, happily watching his daughters graduate from the University of Florida. He used to get scans every three months, but now he gets scanned once a year.
These days, Sodeika is a board member of the Florida Cancer Specialists Foundation (FCSF), which helps needy cancer patients of Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute with living expenses while they undergo treatment. In this role, he gives talks to groups of the practice’s employees and FCSF volunteers across the state to help them see the positive impact they have from a patient’s perspective.
His advice to people in general: Check in on the cancer patient’s family as well. “Everybody always focuses on the patient, and asked, ‘How’s John doing? How’s John? How’s John?’ But it’s super important to always check in on the family. It’s almost harder on the family than it is on the patient.”