The beginning of the journey

It's Tuesday, the day after my 3rd chemo and 10th external radiation. I feel like I'm barely alive. I started throwing up at 4am and spent an hour in the bathroom. I tried to get my stomach calmed enough to take the pill for nausea/vomiting. By the time I got that down and had it down long enough to take my regular morning meds (one of which is a $130 pill, don't want to throw that up accidentally), it was 7am. I slept until about 10am. I am barely here.

It gets rougher as the treatments progress. I take chemo once a week, external radiation five times a week, and I start internal radiation next week with about one a week for five sessions. The chemo is a very powerful mix of drugs that are designed to kill fast growing cells as cancer cells are fast growing. But it does not distinguish between cancer and non-cancer cells. That is why hair falls out, why your mouth feels like it is burned out, and that all the tissue between your mouth and your anus (internally) is all fast growing cells. Those cells are being killed at the same time. Which is why I feel so raw inside. My skin hurts a lot of the time too. Very sensitive to the touch. My hair is thinning out, but is not noticeable on a large scale yet. Hopefully it won't be.

The radiation doesn't hurt at the time of getting it, but about 2 hours after that is when the extra pain starts in the specific region of the tumor. Radiation burns the cells by going through my outer body, so I am burned from the inside out (looks like a sunburn). Both the chemo and the radiation make me very nauseated and which results in praying to the porcelain goddess 80% of the time, and the both give some hard core diarrhea.

I have very little appetite anymore. I eat a small something about once a day, or sometimes just a couple of small snacks, but I lose the food 50% of the time. I just have to make sure to keep hydrated with all losing of it, and the fact that the chemo I am taking is excessively hard on the kidneys, and I do feel it. They hurt and feel like they need to be purified. I feel very toxic right after chemo. It takes 6 hours on Mondays for chemo. The external radiation only takes about 10 mins every day. The internal radiation is a surgical outpatient procedure that will take a total of 8 hours a time. And I can't be around children for 3 days after that because I will be omitting radioactive waves that can damage the children's growth. Adults can handle it though.

This all happened so fast. Well, I had problems for a while that were apparent to me, but I had no health insurance. I finally got some good insurance through my job, and it came in to effect Jan 1 this year. That first week I went to a general practitioner (not knowing where to start the ball) and told them of all my problems. Extreme abdominal and lower abdominal pain, pain during sex, bleeding during sex, bleeding between periods often accompanied by extreme pain. Periods getting worse every month with pain. Fatigue, back pain, inability to sleep due to pain. This is what I told them. They did a pap saying I probably had an STD. Embarrassing, yes, but not the end of the world. Unless it was the really bad one. Pap came back abnormal but the test results for Syphilis, Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, and HIV all came back NEGATIVE. Blood work was done and an ultrasound. The doctor decided that even though I had an abnormal pap that happens all the time, we'll wait and see in 3 or 6 more months. In the meantime, my blood work showed elevated white cell count indicating that I was fighting an "acute infection" somewhere in my body, or so I was told. Blood work also indicated that my blood sugar was kinda high and my cholesterol was really high. Odd since I am a healthy eater. Very healthy. But I was still drinking a lot on a daily basis, so that may be why those levels were so high. Well, the doctor never asked me about alcohol or diet, just put my on a 1800 cal ADA diet, proclaimed me borderline diabetic (diabetes does NOT run in my family, however cancer does), prescribed me diabetic drugs and diagnosed me with Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome.

Nowhere in that were my complaints even listened to. Diabetic? Wait and See? No followup on an abnormal pap? Then the day I went there asking for pain medication because I could no longer sleep and taking Advil all day was not doing it. Every time I went to the doc for followups or whatever she kept trying to stick me with an STD even though they already tested me for it and I was negative. Anyway, the pain meds, she gave them to me, but not after having a discussion with someone outside the exam room door about how I was there to get them to sell them on the street. Yes, it's true. You see, the doc didn't believe I was in pain. Because the disease she diagnosed me with wouldn't cause me pain. Well, hello, when I first came to you what symptoms did I tell you I had? Anyway, at that point when she came back with a script for Vicodin, I said to her "You don't believe I am in pain, even though it's been a symptom from the get-go when I first came to see you 3 months ago. You put me on diabetic drugs that made me violently sick and told me to keep taking them when I told you this was happening. I am not a diabetic. And I am really thinking that I don't have PCOS either. Admit that you are out of your league." She stood there looking at me and finally said, "I don't know what I am dealing with here." I said "Thanks for admitting it. Have a good day." And left.

Then I went over the list of doctors that are in network and took the advice of my mom and chose one out of a list of about 5. I called them myself about 1 week after the last episode at the general practice. When I told the girl on the phone what had happened she kinda freaked out and said "You have to get in here right away, I can get you in on Friday." It was Tuesday when I called, and I didn't have a referral, so I was kinda surprised at how fast they got me in. That was on April 10. I had an exam on that day and the doctor saw what kind of pain I was in. He was completely sympathetic with how long I had been having the pain, how I couldn't sleep and was missing work, so he gave me some more pain meds and scheduled me for another ultrasound for the following Thursday. Then the Tuesday after that I had a culposcopy, which he saw what he thought was a polyp. He scheduled surgery for the following Thursday to remove it and to do a laproposcopy and a hysteroscopy to see if there were any problems around the outsides of my organs. He took biopsies when he did the culposcopy but we didn't have the results yet. So I went into surgery expecting to have a polyp removed and be back at work in 4 days. I came out of surgery with nothing removed and the news that he was 99.9% sure I had cervical cancer. The polyp turned out to be a tumor with a diameter of 6 cm in my cervix and had started to spread to the tissues outside the cervix. A few days later it was confirmed by pathology, squamous cell carcinoma stage 2b. That was on May 5. Between the 5th and the 18th I had every test imaginable done so that my oncologist could be totally sure that I had it nowhere else in my body, because it had gone unchecked for so long. They believe that early detection would have occurred 4-5 years ago. So I had CT Scans, MRI's, PET Scans. I had leg molds made and dots tattooed on me so that they can line up the radiation on the exact same points every time, and the leg mold holds you in the same position for every treatment. I had teaching sessions of what these treatments were going to do to me and the best things I can do to ease the discomfort, pain, rawness, etc. Skincare, mouth care, rump care, diet, exercise, etc.

All the nurses I see on a regular basis are really nice. And one of my radiation nurses was also one of my dad's oncology nurses 20 years ago when he was dying of melanoma. How is that for strange? She remembers my mom and my dad and me, except for now it's 20 years later and it's just me and my mom, and she is trying to heal me. It brings tears when I think about it.

Well, I think I am going to take a shower before I have to go to radiation, even though I feel like just laying down. Ugh.