Surgery #1 and Some Shocking News

First, I must say I haven't posted anything in several days because I had a full 5-day week of chemo last week.  It seems that each subsequent cycle of treatment is harsher than the last for me.  The good news is it was my last cycle, most likely.  I cannot put into words how ill and uncomfortable I felt over the weekend, even up until now.  I can say I have never looked forward to anything more than feeling normal and healthy again.  They say it takes 6-8 weeks for chemo to start leaving your system--I only hope that happens sooner for me.  I await the day when I do not feel the punch of the side affects, the day my hair starts growing again, the day my skin coloration goes back to normal.  

Now, back to telling my story...

By now it was early evening and I still sat with my mother in the ER, waiting for a spot to open up for me in the Operating Room.  My younger sister was home alone in South Jersey, so as soon as it was time for me to go into surgery around 10 pm I knew my mother had to leave.  I was sorry to see her go but she promised to return the next day once I was in recovery, and I knew she would.  The rest of the evening was a blur; the surgery didn’t take long but I remember being miserable when I awoke; my throat hurt and burned from the breathing tube and I felt the anesthesia wearing off as I became more aware of the cut across my lower abdomen.  Eventually I fell in and out of sleep until the next morning when my mother was standing next to my bed all of a sudden.  I was grateful for her presence; the nurses, irritated me and I just wanted my mother’s consolation and not theirs.  Though I complained and whined to her about the pain and the overall aversion I have to the sterilized scent of hospitals, this surgery would be nothing compared to the subsequent one I would experience weeks later.

The next morning I was told it was time to go home.  I was shocked at this suddenness, but my surgeon was convinced as long as I could stand up, walk and sit down there was no reason for me to be in the hospital.  I was fine with it and called my mother right away to come pick me up.  When she arrived a few hours later, she asked if I wanted to recover from my surgery in my apartment in New Brunswick.  I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not so I didn’t answer, but then she laughed and said she would never let that happen.  I was unable to take care of myself and frankly I was the only person who kept the apartment semi-clean, as my roommate seemed to have no problem with not only washing dishes but cleaning anything at all.  I knew this would aggravate me even more being helpless in bed, so of course I returned to my mother’s clean and tidy comfortable home in South Jersey. 

It was nice being home.  My mother and younger sister helped bring me anything I needed.  It was glorious, even.  I felt remorse, asking for food and other needs to be brought to me, however after a few days, I was astonished that I was feeling better already.  On the Friday of the week of my surgery, my mother and I returned to New Brunswick for a follow-up appointment with my surgeon.  The appointment was going well—he said the incision looked great and removed the large stitch.  I could return to work sometime the following week if I wished (which, of course, I didn’t and my mother gave me a look that said “absolutely not”).  But then something happened.  My surgeon stopped talking and told me to sit down in a chair next to my mother—I was confused and unsure of what else there was to say.  The atmosphere of the appointment changed.  He said the pathology results from my cyst had returned, and it was in fact a tumor.  A mass of cancerous cells.  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.  Even as he said it, for some reason I can’t explain why I wasn’t more troubled by this news.  My first thought was wow, how did I get cancer?  But my immediate subsequent thought was, well, at least they took it out and it’s gone!  Not so much.  It would get much more complicated.

An Anxiety-Ridden Visit to the ER

After checking in to the Emergency Room and the painful ordeal of moving my illegally parked car into the Visitor Parking Deck, I was finally called in to have my vital signs checked by a nurse.  I was sent over to one of the many cots in the ER separated from the others by only a curtain.  An ER Doctor approached me and asked questions.   I had a pelvic exam, ultrasound, and MRI over the next several hours; meanwhile, I was injected with morphine to keep me quiet.  Most of the time I was left alone on my cot while the ER filled up with trauma patients wailing about UTIs and kidney stones.  

My mother sent me a text asking how I was feeling ever since our unresolved conversation the night before.  I thought of not responding, wanting to deal with the situation on my own—I was still in the mindset that I would be returning to work in a few hours, as I updated my boss via email every half hour, apologizing profusely and fibbing that I was held up at doctor’s appointment all morning.  Amidst the waves of pain emanating from my lower left side, I could only wonder about the list of tasks I had ahead of me to finalize for the Arizona primary the next day once I got into work.  Upon my second dosage of morphine around 9 am, I asked the nurse if I could leave soon, making a fuss about needing to get into work before noon.  The nurse looked at me oddly and just said in her thick Eastern European accent, “Do you not want morphine?” 

To which I responded, “No! Please,” as another shot of pain encircled my side. 

I am and always have been way too attached to my mother to ignore her calls or texts.  It is uncanny, but I am able to ignore any other person I know for days if I don’t wish to return their call.  Which is not to say I don’t value my friendships with people; that is entirely false.  I have always had a bond with my mother—tenacious enough to cause me deep anguish when I moved away to college and various other times in my life—a bond which would grow ever stronger in the following months.  So naturally, I texted my mother back that I was in the hospital waiting to hear what was wrong with me.  Naturally, her response was she drove up to New Brunswick immediately.  I will likely mentioned this more than once in this blog:  I am so lucky and grateful to have a mother with the energy and desire to care for me as she still does today, given the gravity of my health status this past year. 

Once it was decided that day I was to have an emergency surgery, my mother took over the situation and handled conversations with the nurses, the medical students, and eventually the surgeon.  All that was suspected was that I had a cyst on my ovary that appeared solid—meaning it could not be deflated through a simple procedure leaving a minimal scar, but I would receive an incision similar to that of a woman having a Cesarean section.  Give the pain I was in, I didn’t care what happened as long as it stopped immediately.  I called my boss at work and told her the news, and that I would not be going into New York for the Arizona primary election, nor would I likely be at work for at least a week or two.  

Backstory Continued...

During the weekend preceding February 27^th I was very much looking forward to Monday.  I had hired all of the Exit Pollsters in Arizona within two weeks of receiving the project and I was excited to finally be given the actual responsibility of managing a project after months of dreary, repetitive assignments.  The Saturday before the 27^th I awoke with a pain in my lower left abdomen.  It wasn’t sharp, and I pointed it out to my roommate Prasana, joking that eating five Mallomars the night before probably wasn’t such a good idea.  Prasana agreed and insisted it was the sweets making me ill.  I drank coffee and ate breakfast assuming it would just go away in a bit of time, though a few episodes of Downton Abbey later the pain was still there.  I thought maybe getting out of the house and moving around would be a wise decision, so I left for the Menlo Park Mall. 

This most certainly was a weekend of misfortune for me; I found out the fun way that the Menlo Park Mall in Central Jersey is in all probability the worst place to drive to on a Saturday, and after being unable to find parking for 30 minutes, I turned around and set back for the condo.  The pain had gotten sharper at this point but still, I ignored it. 

After maybe 2 hours of sleep that night, it was Sunday and I had to go into work to track down any Exit Pollsters who might have bailed on me.  I drove to work around 1 pm.  As soon as I sat down at my desk the pain seemed to be getting worse.  I struggled through making about 50 phone calls despite my discomfort, and it took until almost 6:00 pm.  When it was time to leave, I thought maybe I should see someone about my pain before the work day tomorrow. 

I stopped at an urgent care center after leaving work only to discover it was closed for the day.  After calling a few other centers it seemed that most close around 5 pm on Sundays.  I wasn’t nearly ready to give in to the hospital, so I just drove back to the condo, crying in agony the entire ride.  Prasana could tell something was wrong as I clutched my lower stomach and kept walking in circles.  She immediately insisted it was stress, and then launched into a series of anecdotes as she often does.  I politely listened to her discuss her theories based on numerable past family and friends’ various medical situations, none of which sounded remotely similar to my pain.  While Prasana was talking, all of a sudden she mentioned a mental situation a friend or some other person was in recently and I perked up.  I listened more closely and nodded, though my mind started to wander.  Perhaps I was hallucinating the pain I was suffering from, or I was so stressed and unhappy in general about my current work and life situation that it was physically hurting me.  I was physically hurting me.

Prasana was concerned about me; our 10 year age difference had always caused her to act like a watchful mother around me, feeding me, giving me rides when needed, taking note when I felt ill.  She gave me Extra Strength Tylenol.  I took 4 of those and thought I felt better, so I started making dinner for us.  The pain started to resurface while I was cooking so I left the stove unattended and lied on my bed to call my mother.  She insisted I was unhappy and depressed as usual, and that my pain was nothing.  I of course began crying on the phone, while listening to Prasana shout my name and something about food burning.  I hung up quickly and ran to the kitchen to find Prasana holding out a pot of burnt creole shrimp.  After she annoyingly scolded me like a child about how you’re “not supposed to leave a stove with a burner unattended!” I cried some more and said I would start dinner over.  She insisted we salvage the burnt food and we ate it in silence.  I didn’t care at that point; my pain was coming in waves now, radiating throughout my body from the small spot on my lower left abdomen, and I just wanted to get to bed.

I couldn’t sleep that night.  I took more Tylenol and waited, but felt no relief.  Every position on my bed was agony.  I switched to the couch.  I got up and got dressed, contemplating the hospital, then changed my mind and decided it was nothing and lied back down.  After getting dressed and undressed about five times, at 4:30 am on Monday I got dressed for work but drove to the hospital.  I packed my bag for New York City as I had every intention of being in the phone room for the Arizona Election the next day. 

I drove to Robert Wood Johnson hospital after Google searching 'hospital.'  It was only minutes away. 

Backstory

I should begin with the date February 27^th 2012, when everything started.  February 27^th was a Monday, the day before the Arizona Republican Primary Election.  Former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney was set to have this primary locked up already.  I know this because at the time I was working for a market research company that conducted consumer polls in addition to their biggest project being the Election Exit Polls for the Presidential Primary and General Election in 2012.  The office was located in an inconsequential town in Central New Jersey, impossible to reach easily by highway (at least from South Jersey, where I was living back at my mother’s house after college, prompting me to face the crap situation many broke post-grads have to face—moving out and paying rent).  I moved to the neighboring Central Jersey town of New Brunswick, thinking a big college-ey town would be fun being a recent grad myself. 

Let me just say that I made a huge mistake following this logic—one of many I’ve made in my life so far whenever it has been necessary to make a vital decision.  Somehow, and at least I have noticed, a pattern has revealed itself to me dating back to high school where I am unable to make a wise, common sense decision in any matter regarding my future and myself.  When it comes to the most important decisions—namely, what am I going to do with my life? What career path should I choose?  When should I start worrying about marriage and children?  It seems all of my schooling and education and endless book reading have done nothing to contribute to good, solid logic when deciding what to do with  my life.  Which has, over the years of my early 20s up until I was diagnosed with cancer, morphed me into an anxiety-ridden, introverted, self-loathing, neurotic young woman with no dreams for the future.  It led me to living in New Brunswick, NJ in a dirty apartment with a mediocre first full-time job that took me over a year to come by after graduation. 

I must say here that, my only real concern these days has changed drastically from those I mentioned above:  Will I live long enough for any of these questions to be of importance?

Introductory Post

My intention was to start this blog earlier.  I had no warning that the pain and agony I would be subjected to during the spring of 2012 would prevent me from completing any mundane task—even simple things, like using the restroom and changing my clothes.  I’ve reached a brief hiatus from my chemotherapy treatments, and so finally have the energy to record some of my thoughts since February 27^th, 2012. A blog in the New York Times written by a girl my age diagnosed with leukemia caught my attention and encouraged me to write as well.  I thought it a good mental exercise and use of the ample time I now have and will have in the next few months while I am still receiving treatments.

So as a note to any readers:  the first several blog posts are going to be written in the past tense about events that occurred in the past few months, beginning with 3 months ago.  I will then record posts in the present tense about what is currently happening.  I only hope that someone, another young adult perhaps who has also been struck ill with cancer, reads this blog and becomes inspired by my story.  A person who also learns to accept cancer as an episode in life, if an unfortunate one, and who will become a better person because of it.