Maura: Discovering Colon Cancer
Hello, my name is Maura and I’m a happy mother of three children. I’ve been married 17 years to a wonderful husband. My children’s ages are 15, 13 and 9. I’m living in the Pittsburgh area and I am a cancer survivor. I was a healthy 39-year-old mom, working out at the gym three to four days a week, on a great diet, and I thought I was in the best shape. One day I had a very, very, little small amount of blood in my stool. After a week or two of that, I called the doctor, and the doctor felt that this was an internal hemorrhoid. He did an exam, gave me some medication. Three to four weeks later, I still had some blood in my stool. So they felt that I would need to have a sigmoidoscopy. The doctors who implemented that scope [thought] that at my age the likelihood of this would be an internal hemorrhoid. Five minutes into the process he looked down at me and said, “Maura, I think we’ve found something serious here. I’m going to have you come back tomorrow to have your whole colon checked.” I pleaded and begged with him to do the examination. He insisted that I needed medication and I said no, do it now, that I would not come back. So the doctor proceeded with the process. It was a little bit painful, but he checked my whole colon. I was very fortunate; there was only one site of cancer. He told me that I would need to see an oncologist and need to see a surgeon immediately. Sitting in his office the following day, I was confused and upset. The following day I had a tragic accident in my family. My brother–who was age 43–was killed, leaving a beautiful wife and six super, great children. I kept my cancer secret during the week. I felt that my family had enough to deal with. We were totally in a state of shock, losing one of the greatest brothers you could have. We buried my brother on a Wednesday. The morning of his funeral, my husband and myself went to the doctor’s office at 7:30. The doctor stated he would not do my surgery for two weeks because of the situation that we were dealing with the tragic death. I insisted and pleaded with that doctor to have my surgery on Friday. I told him he had two hours to convince me, and he didn’t, so I left his office, knowing I would be seeing him in 48 hours to have my reconstruction. …read the rest of this entry»

Mary: Five Time Survivor
My name is Mary. I’m 48 years old, single, never had any children due to the kind of tumor I had. In 1973, while driving home from a trip to Oklahoma, a woman with children drove out in front of me to go into a bar. I was so outraged that I pulled behind her and she proceeded to back into my car. Needless to say, I got out and started yelling at her. When I got back on the road, I noticed that I had a small painful lump in my neck, so as soon as I returned home to Texas, I went to the doctor to see what it was.
At first I was told it was an infected node. I was started out on antibiotics, and when it didn’t eventually go away, was scheduled to have a biopsy. The biopsy was said to be normal. Months later I decided the bump, which had now grown, was not in fact normal and needed to be reevaluated. As a nurse at the time, I approached a surgeon, tests were done, and I remember telling him that it was not normal. I remember telling him that if he said it was normal, I was going to get up, walk out, and see yet another doctor. He was a kind of country doctor and gave me a smile as he looked over his glasses. Tests were ordered and I awaited a diagnosis. The tests suggested that I had a malignant thyroid with probable metastasis, so surgery was scheduled within the week. …read the rest of this entry»

Mary McNally: the Initial Shock
My name is Mary; I’m a professor at a University in Montana. I’m presently 45 years old. I’ve lived in Montana for 13 years, but I grew up in New England, and my family’s scattered all over the country, and I don’t have any immediate relatives in this area at all. I was diagnosed four years ago with breast cancer. I was 41 at the time, I was single, holding down a demanding, full-time job. I had been involved in a long-term relationship, but it was a long distance one at that point. So, in other words, I was alone and on my own when this came up. Obviously the diagnosis of cancer was totally unexpected. Isn’t it always? I had found a lump doing a self exam, which hadn’t shown up on a recent mammography. I went in, I pushed it, and had an ultrasound done, and it showed a suspicious growth, so a surgeon did a biopsy. I’d had one previous biopsy a couple of years earlier and it had been fine, so I was expecting the same outcome. So when the surgeon called me back about two days later, and he used the word “malignant”, I just sort of went into shock. I was totally unprepared. And he was great, he was trying to set up an appointment to see me the next day, and I kept saying “Malignant!” and he would say, Well, yes, and we need to see you tomorrow, and I was like, “Malignant!” I couldn’t get off it. But, and I just kept repeating it. And finally I said, “You mean I have cancer?” and he says, “Well, yeah.” You know, that was a horrifying word to me.
Quick surgery
When I went in to see him the next day, I was still in shock, and I was still trying to understand and I kept telling him there’s no history of this in my family, which is true. And he pointed out to me that now there was. I had thought I was too young, none of it made any sense, and it really didn’t make any sense. But it was my new reality. I got the diagnosis on a Thursday and I had surgery the following Monday, I believe. In the meantime, I called family members and they responded by coming out here to be with me. That was an immense help and a relief because I felt pretty overwhelmed. Luckily it was May and the semester had just finished, and I wasn’t teaching summer school then. So I wasn’t immediately juggling work along with everything else. The surgery went pretty well, but the surgeon wasn’t able to get good margins around the growth. I was clearly going to need radiation and possibly chemotherapy. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Marty, and I am 65 years of age. I currently live in Sarasota, Florida, but I’ve just been here three years. I lived most of my adult life in Columbus, Ohio, or rather the suburbs of Columbus. I moved here because my mother was ill. She had Alzheimer’s or a form of dementia, so that I would have no contact with her unless I came down, and so I did. I’m married for the second time. I was married for 30 years, and my husband divorced me for a younger secretary. Then I remarried, and I have been married for 14 years. I have two adult children. They are 40 and 32. My husband has three children. They are younger, 22, 21 and 18. None of them live with us.
Symptoms Trigger a Visit to the Doctor
Regarding my cancer, I’ll start at the beginning. A year ago, in January, I went to the primary care physician for my annual checkup. I had had a problem with a fungus toenail, and so I asked for medication. They gave me the kind that you take on a three- month basis, and I take it for 10 days, and 20 days you’re off of it. However, it makes you very vulnerable to yeast infections. So I took that, and during that time that I was taking it I had some problems around the vagina. I had a lot of itching, and I had even some nodules that appeared. However, I kind of discounted them, because I thought, “Well, this is just a product of taking the medication.” And so I didn’t do anything about it.
After the three months were up, and it seemed to get worse rather than better, then I thought about doing something. However, it was kind of the heart of our season back here, and I was working, very busily working, and so I didn’t call immediately to the gynecologist and waited about two or three weeks. The first time I could get in was in July. In fact, they had tried to give me August or September, and I said, “No. I really need to get in much earlier than that. I have a problem.” And they said, well July was the soonest I could get in. …read the rest of this entry»

My name is Martha. My son is Daniel. My son was sick with cancer. He had a tumor, or he still may have it, but I think that the tumor is cured now. This I hope.
Testing Reveals Cancer
He was diagnosed the first time on the 14th of May, 2001. It was then that I realized that he had a tumor in the right side of his face, the sinus area. It was a large tumor. When I took him [to the hospital] that day, I did not know that. I only took him because he was bleeding from the nose, and because I believe that part of the tumor was coming out of his nose. All of the doctors thought that it was something like a blood clot, but they couldn’t get it out, and that was when they had to take an X-ray. They realized that he had a mass on that side of his face.
Afterwards, there was a two-week hospital stay. That was when they started all of the tests. They did tests on his bone marrow; they did tests on his bones, in case he had cancer in those parts of his body. Thank God, he did not have cancer anywhere else. Also at that time they did a study of his–they put something in his nose. They cleaned everything out, they took out tissue, they examined it, and they saw that it was really a malignant tumor. It was very difficult when they told me that the boy did, in fact, have cancer. …read the rest of this entry»

Marilyn: a mother’s story
Hello. My name is Marilyn. I am 67 years of age at this point in time. I am married. Have been for fifty-seven years. I have four living children, 2 boys and 2 girls. Suzanne is my third child and she is the one I’m going to talk about today. About nine years ago, eight years ago, in 1991it was, she had not been feeling very well for about a year. We were very confused. She’d been going to a doctor. She was a very athletic girl, very active, very involved, but she had been tired and depressed and all these things that just didn’t seem like her. In late September of 1991, she had a seizure, a grand mal seizure. She was living in an apartment with two other girls, and of course it scared them about to death. They had the presence of mind to call the ambulance and she was taken to the hospital and she was out for several hours. We urged the doctors at that time to find out what was wrong and they said maybe it was just a quirk, and it wouldn’t happen again.
But the following Wednesday, while she was at the hospital to get some tests, it happened again, and they still said, why don’t you just wait and see, but they did put her on some seizure medication so that it might not happen again. She had a CT scan, which we insisted upon, and they did find a small, dark mark on her left frontal lobe, and so, they again said why don’t you just let it go and see if it grows or if it changes. Well, we didn’t want to do that so we did pull some strings and got her into a brain surgeon here in Salt Lake City and he again x-rayed and did the scans and said, why don’t we wait for a few months. But we said no, so he scheduled a biopsy for November. In November she had a biopsy and we were told, oh, don’t worry, there’s no problem, we’ll just get it taken care of, and there’s no chance that it’s cancerous. But it came back cancerous.
Resilience in the face of adversity
So she was then again scheduled for another doctor and another program so to speak. This doctor recommended a new trial where she would have chemotherapy plus she would have radiation twice a day. And so she started this out for six weeks. The chemo went a little longer, but the radiation was twice a day for six weeks, five days a week. She continued to work. Suzanne’s a hair stylist, very talented, and had a huge clientele. And she would go where others would just give up with the radiation because they were so tired, she’d continue to work throughout the whole time. She’d go in the morning and get her radiation and go back and work and then she’d go up again in the afternoon and go back and work. And most of the time, she would even drive herself, where at times she wasn’t feeling well enough I would take her, especially after she’d had some chemo. …read the rest of this entry»

Marcia: coping with cancer twice
My name is Marcia, I’m forty seven years old, I live in Connecticut, I’m married for 36 years this year, have two daughters, 34 and 31, and three grandsons. And back in 1988 I was graduating from Yale School of Public Health and my daughter was graduating from Harvard, the older one, and I discovered that I had rectal cancer. And I had surgery, which left me with an ileostomy, because I had had colitis, and I had radiation, which burned out my ovaries, which nobody told me about. I wish I had, I didn’t know enough to ask. And I had chemotherapy which lasted for about a year but was relatively benign except that it took 3 or 4 hours, once a week for 6 weeks, and then a couple of weeks off. I didn’t feel bad and I didn’t lose my hair, so after that was all over, I decided not to continue working. I had planned to do something with my public health degree and I became a photographer and I volunteered at the local hospital for a doctor who was doing cancer research.
So I muddle along until about 1997, and I hadn’t had any periods, and I suddenly started bleeding. I went to my doctor, had tests, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong, they kept saying there wasn’t anything, it’s just “radiation damage”. And I knew that probably wasn’t right but there wasn’t any way of proving it, until 1998, November, I had an intestinal obstruction in the small bowel that I have left, and when they did the CT scans, my colorectal surgeon said, “You’re uterus looks enlarged.” And I said, “well, please feel free to have somebody take it out.” And they did, and the discovered that I had uterine cancer, which had actually eaten through my uterus and I guess what was eaten through was covered up by the obstruction, so it may have protected it from any of the cells from getting out. …read the rest of this entry»

Lynne: two-time survivor
Hi. My name is Lynne, and I am a 32-year-old female, and I’ve survived cancer not one, but two times. I’m gonna tell you a little bit about my story. When I was sixteen months old, I was diagnosed with something called a neuroblastoma, which is a form of childhood cancer, and my mother actually found a lump when she was changing my diaper, and wasn’t sure what it was so took me to the pediatrician. And it turned out to be a neuroblastoma and I was treated with chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. My chances for survival were not good. Back then radiation was still at the edges you know still being a clinical trial, they hadn’t perfected it yet. The type of cancer and the size of it was not good, so they basically told my mother I probably had 3 to 6 months to live. My mother is a very religious person so she prayed a lot, took me to healing masses, and she also took me into Boston and I was treated at one of the major Boston institutions, so I was very fortunate and survived. So that’s my infant story.
But when I was 13 years old I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, which is bone cancer. I had been experiencing pain in my right leg and kept going back to the doctors and they couldn’t seem to find anything wrong with me. They actually went so far as telling my mother that I needed a psychiatrist because you know I needed some extra attention and I was regressing back to when I was a child and wanted the attention of when I had been in the hospital. So my mother just kept taking me back, and finally they found a very small spot on my hip that they gave fancy diagnostic name to, and told us that we didn’t need to worry about it, it may have been caused by radiation and wouldn’t be cancerous. So we asked for a second opinion, and because we were again fortunate enough to be treated in Boston, received nine second opinions from some of the top bosses at that particular hospital, that all decided to use the “watch and wait” theory.
The second time
When I went back in a couple of months, the small site that they had discovered had turned into probably the size of a golf ball, maybe a little bit larger, and turned out that it was bone cancer. So immediately they brought me to the hospital to have a biopsy and they went from the little site being nothing to being terminal bone cancer. …read the rest of this entry»

Lucrecia: breast cancer survivor
My name is Lucrecia. I am 53 years old, and I’m married. I have two children and three step-children. I am originally from the republic of Panama, but I have been living in Wisconsin for the last 16 years. My story begins just like any other ordinary woman’s story. In my forties or even before that, I noticed the early signs of menopause. I began to watch my health more closely, including having mammograms when these were not recommended for women younger than fifty years old. Since then, I have had mammogram yearly. When I was round 46 years old because of the early signs of menopause the discomfort of it. In my case it was an arythmia My doctor recommended hormone replacement therapy. So I began. I was very reluctant to have it, but I did it anyway, in order to ease the symptoms. One year followed another, and my intention was only to take it for just enough to tide me over. But as things happened, it went one year after another and pretty soon it was five years since I had been taking this hormone replacement therapy. In the meantime, I began to feel uncomfortable about my health. I didn’t feel healthy, I felt like there was something wrong with me. But every time I went to the doctor there was nothing found and I didn’t have any grounds to expect anything. Then in 1997 I went to have a mammogram and for some reason the doctors kept me waiting in the waiting room for some time when I requested when I asked if there was anything wrong, they couldn’t reply to me.
Back in 1988, I have to turn back, I had a little scare. It was very unsettling. I went for a regular mammogram and they found some calcifications on the x-ray. But six months later the x-ray came out negative. So since then I even had even more interest in being there every year for that mammogram. And like I said in 97 that happened but it was ruled that it was okay so I went home. The time passed. When I had to go back in November, day before thanksgiving in 98 I went to get my mammogram and technician looked at me and said ‘Are your breasts always that way? I said What way. And she said, let me take a look again at the x-rays. And she did about seven or eight compressions of my breast and she was not very satisfied. She was not satisfied and she was asking me to disrobe in order for her to see both my breasts and then that’s when she asked me if they were always that way and I said, what way, and she said, one breast is bigger than the other one. No I have never noticed it that way except now with the compression I feel I was hurting, I was really, really, really hurting, and so she went on looking for a doctor an x-ray radiologist or my gynecologist and she couldn’t find anybody and she asked me to be sure and call on Friday. This was Wednesday, on Friday to make sure I get in for an ultrasound and then nothing further, — she didn’t say anything else. At this time my breast was hurting me very much, so I came home and -I proceeded– to have Thanksgiving so called normal, but I was very distraught. What I was feeling and also for the possibility of having something more serious than just a sore breast. And then on Friday when I called I went in I insisted wouldn’t take no for an answer, and went for an ultrasound, and they were very flabbergasted because of what they saw. I still didn’t know what was going on. …read the rest of this entry»

Hello. My name is Lisa. I live in St. Petersburg, Florida. I’m 27 years old, single with no kids, and I’m going to tell my story, so here goes. It all started way back in 1995. I got dizzy when I was working out, and that was very odd for me, because I’ve always been a very healthy person, and I just never had dizzy spells before. But I blew it off as just one of those weird things that happens, but then they started to increase. They increased, and I kept blowing them off, and then I started losing my balance. And I was an avid swimmer, dancer. I loved gymnastics. I didn’t have a problem with my balance. So this was just so odd. I mean, I was falling down hurting myself.
And then I began to hallucinate, very small things at first. And then I got very tired, like chronic fatigue, but I didn’t know what it was. And then it all came together and I started having dreams in my reality. I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that I was like in my own personal hell, basically. Either I was dreaming when I was awake, thinking awake, but I was not really awake. I was still sleeping. And then I got myself into some not so good situations doing that, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I was dreaming, but I thought I was awake. It was very bad, very bad. And I was terrified.
Doctor, Why Is This Happening?
So I went to a medical doctor, and he did the blood tests, and he said that there was physically nothing wrong with me. Well, that of course only added to my fear that I was losing my mind. What else could be happening if I wasn’t losing my mind? …read the rest of this entry»