The First 60 Seconds of Cancer ...

The word. The Cancer word. It doesn’t have to be a death sentence.

I’m told that I have cancer.  It’s terminal.  I have only two months to live.
I’m instantly wrapped in an empty void.  No one is in there with me.  I’m truly alone.  A door has slammed shut, and I feel it lock tight.  I can’t touch the key because it’s only a word.  Cancer is the storm that blew the door closed, and it is the key that locked me out of my right to live.  I’m terrified.  I’m broken.  I take my next breath.

My oncologist is saying,“ I can’t treat you”.  No! I need help!  I want to fight for my life!  Someone has to help me do what I don’t know how to do.  Someone has to help me do what I can’t do alone!

So, I find another oncologist.  This one says, “I won’t treat you”.  “Why”, I ask?  “Because there might be more cancer in your liver than shows on the PET scan”.  “What do you mean… might?”

Three oncologists, a GP, and two surgeons all delivered the same grim outcome.  I had nine cancer sites that had spread from the original site in the colon.  All the help the oncologists were willing to give me was advice:  Go home and get your affairs in order.  This is where I found myself in November/December of 2005, just three months after my husband dropped dead at my feet.  I wish I had known then what I know now.  But, of course… I didn’t.

This is an autobiography, only inasmuch as I have to tell you my story, where I was in the beginning, in the middle of the fray, and how it all turned out.  I need to tell my story so a victim with cancer…any type of cancer… can dredge up the courage to fight the disease, have the faith to renounce their death sentence, and the hope they need to keep them alive.  It’s a hope that is born from their own grit and nurtured by God to see their battle with cancer through to a positive outcome.

The Long Road Back

Many, if not most people, have no idea there are options to consider in their battle with cancer.  Victims of cancer aren’t concerned about their choices and options when they’re first diagnosed.  They’re looking at an oncologist, a man or a woman, who is driven by statistics that he or she uses to predict the patient’s outcome.  The doctors know all about the drugs, the surgeries, the pain, and they’ve seen the desperation of the patient’s circumstances.  However, our medical universities don’t teach them about other options: Options that could very well save their lives.

Doctors have seen the drugs and surgeries used to treat cancer fail too many times.  So, somewhere along their way, too many of them have lost the ability to bring along compassion to the treatment table.  It’s as though they’ve forgotten that the patient’s heart and soul are not just by-products of the patient’s self. Our hearts and souls are the very spirit that gives us meaning.  Our spirit is an essential part of our recovery.  Some doctors seem to have forgotten that our spirit is that part of us that makes us tick, that helps us fight, that allows us to believe that we really can win.

My brother and sister-in-law helped me find an oncologist who would give me the right to fight my disease, and one who was willing to do whatever he could to give me the chance to go on with life.  I had to drive 220 miles each way to get the treatments that I couldn’t find at home.  But, I didn’t care one bit.  I had to do what I had to do.  I took the help I was offered, and I thanked God for the one doctor who would fight for me, and the only one I could find who would fight with me.

Time, however, was all he could offer.  My cancer was too aggressive, he said, and had spread too far to hope that it could be cured.  He felt he might extend my life to a year if I chose to take his treatments. He sent me to a colorectal surgeon that he had faith in.  The surgeon who examined me felt I should have colorectal surgery immediately.  However, my oncologist told me that I didn’t have enough lifetime left to consider the surgery.  I needed to get the chemotherapy drugs started as quickly as possible.  So, I was given 51 hours of three different chemotherapy drugs, and one drug booster, every other week for six months.

I nearly died of pneumonia after the first chemotherapy treatment.  I wanted to die after the second, as the drugs were burning my esophagus so badly I could barely sip water.  I couldn’t take the third treatment because my blood counts (neutrophils) were so very low.  It was at that time in my battle with cancer and the horribl