To start the story at the beginning, go here
Some of the more uncomfortable parts of healing from a major surgery are the side effects that pain medication can cause. The medications are definitely a Godsend and a necessity to help manage the pain which allows you to be more active and aid your body in healing while preventing the complications of inactivity. However, they also slow down your gut motility…a lot. It seems like a taboo subject because no one really wants to talk “bathroom talk” (as we tell our kids when they talk about it). But I was really struggling to have a bowel movement. It had been over a week with no results but with a feeling of how I’ll describe as “colon heaviness.” Like there was something there that didn’t want to come out. I finally resorted to medical means of suppositories and stool softeners. They helped get stuff out, but the heaviness feeling continued. The juice helped even more, but I knew I needed to get off the Percocet. It was a little scary to imagine what kind of pain would be waiting for me when I stopped the pills. I still had to hold my belly when I coughed and I still walked hunched over because it hurt to straighten up all the way. Jeremy also encouraged me to get off the medication. He has seen a few too many people become addicted to pain medications following surgery and how it has damaged relationships and lives. I think the thought, or rather fear, that I could become addicted was in the back of his mind. I’m also not one to quickly turn to the medicine cabinet for any malady. In fact, I had only been on a prescription antibiotic once in my whole life for a minor UTI during my first pregnancy. I was once given a prescription for Vicodin after my wisdom teeth were removed that I never filled. I didn’t like having to rely on a pill for anything. So I started to think about how soon I should stop.
On the day of my next appointment with Dr. Wingo we packed up some juice and nuts and formula for the day. We placed Blake in his carseat and started driving towards her office in North Phoenix. On the drive we talked about the apparent bleakness of our situation. It seemed so surreal all that had happened: having our fifth child during a major surgery with a subsequent terminal cancer diagnosis. I was dealing with the elation of having a sweet perfect baby along with the crazy hormonal swings of sudden surgical menopause and the devastation that I would probably not live to see this baby grow up. It seemed like the perfect storyline for one of those Lifetime movies my college roommate would watch every Sunday. If only we had known about ‘Gofundme’ sites back then. We could have had money pouring in to cover the expenses of Dr. Huber’s treatments. At one point I looked at my husband and marveled at how he could still find humor and laugh and be so normal when our lives were going through such an upheaval. I am truly thankful that Heavenly Father helped him to be so strong for me during this time and to help me feel like a normal person that had cancer–not a victim of cancer.
We reached Dr. Wingo’s office and I drank a carrot juice before exiting the car and a couple of Percocet when we reached the waiting room. The receptionist and women in the waiting room looked at Blake and smiled and commented that it is rare that they get to see a baby in the oncologist’s office. When we went back to the exam room we fed Blake a bottle of formula. He really was a good baby that hardly fussed or cried. Dr. Wingo came in and after a few pleasantries we got down to business to talk about the treatment options. We reviewed the pathology. We talked about hormone therapy which I still thought could be an option since my particular cancer had both estrogen and progesterone markers on it (which is probably why it grew so quickly during the pregnancy). But Dr. Wingo said that all the research shows hormone therapy is ineffective for leiomyosarcoma. She said we could try it, but she didn’t sound optimistic. I love that she was willing to let me choose whatever treatment I felt comfortable with, even if she disagreed with its efficacy. She mentioned chemotherapy again which we quickly dismissed since the research shows that it loses effectiveness after about 3-6 months and has only been shown to decrease tumor size, without eliminating the cancer. In fact, the cancerous tumors were shown to grow back even more aggressively after the chemotherapy. We told her that we talked to Mary and we had an appointment to see a naturopath later that day. She was very kind and wished us the best of luck and basically said that since she didn’t have anything else to offer us, this would be our last appointment but that we should keep in touch. She asked if I needed any more pain medication prescription and I said yes. I was running out and I thought that I would rather be safe than sorry if I should need them for pain even though I was planning on stopping them altogether. We said our good-byes and left.
We raced across town to get to our appointment with Dr. John in Tempe and snacked on nuts and apples along the way. I was a little nervous and excited at the same time to see what he could tell us. Since I had been trained in the medical field as a nurse years ago I was only accustomed to what conventional medicine could provide. I was anxious to see the holistic side of medicine.
One of the first things I noticed when we first entered the office was that it seemed a lot less “sterile” and bleak than a normal doctor’s office. It was smaller and quieter. When we met Dr. John, it was hard not to notice that, unlike a lot of medical doctors I had known, he really takes care of himself. He was in prime physical condition. I mean, it was quite literally hard not to notice his bulging muscles. During this time period Jeremy quipped a phrase, “never trust a fat doctor.” And Dr. John definitely was not a fat doctor. Dr. John was also very serious. Jeremy likes to joke around a lot to ease tense situations–it’s one of his coping mechanisms. But Dr. John didn’t think he was very funny. He definitely had a very serious demeanor. He began by looking at my chart with the operation report and the results of all my scans and blood work that I brought from my time in the hospital and Dr. Wingo. It was silent for a few minutes while he looked over the packet of paperwork. He then began asking a lot of strange questions: “Did you swim in a lot of lakes as a kid? Do you have a lot of fillings in your teeth? Did you play with mercury as a child? Do you live near power poles or radio towers?” I was hoping he would ask some random question that I could say ‘yes’ to that would explain everything. But it was pretty much a no to everything. He then recommended a list of blood tests he wanted to run to get more information. I happily agreed. I was kind of excited to see what kind of tests he would order and the results he would find. Besides all the imaging scans I had done prior, I hadn’t had many tests or blood work done that explained why my body was growing cancer—why I wasn’t just a random person in the crowd that started growing the disease. I mean, for some people it makes sense why they have cancer: the smoker with lung cancer, the sun-bather with melanoma, the tobacco-chewer with oral cancer. Those made sense in my mind. Those specific life-style choices have definitively been shown to cause cancer. But I felt like I was a generally healthy person that exercised often and was focused on a healthy diet. And that is one of the scariest things about cancer—it seems like the medical community still doesn’t fully understand why some people get cancer and others don’t. However, after 3 sticks of a needle and nine tubes of blood later, I was finally about to get some answers.
To continue with the story, go here.