Hope, Faith & Love

I had the privilege to do a Cherry Tree session for my dear friend Shannon. When she told me that she wanted to have her daughter Scarlett do the session with her two grandmothers I thought that would be so sweet & special. See Shannon's mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2012. Her story shows so much strength and perseverance. She had gone through so much and the sickness was overwhelming but with Hope, Faith & Love they have found life manageable with the cancer.

Read more of Shannon's story about her mom below.

For over 20 years my mom had been seeing a pulmonologist because spots had been detected on her lungs.  The doctors told her they were just calcifications, but she should still monitor them.  She didn’t smoke and there was no real history of cancer in her family (her mother is still alive and very healthy for an 80+ year old).  She found a doctor in Warner Robins that she trusted and he became not only her pulmonologist, but also her primary care physician.

Now that I think back, she was ill at our family get-togethers for several years before the diagnosis…she would start cooking a holiday dinner and then just go to bed.  We just thought allergies, flu…we never suspected cancer.  She would see her doctor, he would order scans, and he told her it was just the usual spots and nothing to worry about.    

April of 2013 my mom was teaching school, she had just been Teacher of the Year a few years back.  She was feeling tired and achy, but she still worked from 7am to 8pm every day.  In July we went on a trip and she was in terrible pain in her side and back.  She had already been told her scans were clear by her pulmonologist, so she saw a surgeon and had a colonoscopy.  It came back clear, but the surgeon was concerned and set her up for a liver biopsy.  My sister and I went with her.  We could tell immediately by the tone of the appointment and references to previous scans that we should be very worried. 

Her primary care physician met with us, and after an hour of talking about everything else under the sun, he told us they found “a tiny bit” of cancer in her liver.
The biopsy came back showing spindle cell cancer in her liver.  DON’T GOOGLE IT.  I demanded a PET Scan and an appointment with an Oncologist.  The Oncologist had the pleasure of telling my mom, my sisters and me that the cancer probably originated in the lungs, was now in the spine and liver and was classified as Stage 4.  Surgery was not an option.  The only option was to slow the growth and control the symptoms with a shot once a month.  We were “lucky” because this is a relatively slow growing cancer. 

How could a slow growing cancer come out of nowhere and be stage four when my mom had had a scan earlier that year and even one the year before with no sign of cancer?  Well, it was present on those scans.  The one in 2012 revealed the cancer in just the lungs, the scan in early 2013 showed the cancer in the lungs and now in the liver.  My mom never saw those scans, she was just assured by her pulmonologist that she was fine.

She was diagnosed with a very rare cancer, Neuroendocrine Tumor Carcinoma, which we now refer to as NET.  We were discouraged from seeing a specialist.  Clueless as we were, we wouldn’t even have known how to find one back then.  After insisting on a second opinion from an institute of higher education we ended up at Mayo in Jacksonville.  We just saw whatever oncologist they assigned us to.  We ended up with a doctor who told us that if we did not fight this aggressively, with the very aggressive chemo Cisplatin with Etoposide and radiation, my mother would be dead in three months.  We started the treatment immediately.      

My mother reacted very poorly to this chemo and radiation.  We expected her to lose her hair and be weak, maybe nauseous…We did not expect her to lose all of her strength, unable to walk, in constant pain, incontinent, and unwilling to drink or eat from the radiation burns.  The “chemo brain” made her act like she had dementia.  She hallucinated, had no memory, she could not string cognitive thoughts together.  She could not be alone.  I spent two and a half days a week every week for 4 months away from my little girl and husband to take care of her.  My sister arranged to work from home a few days a week and drove over 2 hours one way every week to take care of her.  My other sister used her only off days to care for her.  After about 6 rounds of chemo, we saw little change, and we felt like the chemo would kill her before the cancer could. 

During this time, the initial shock had worn off and I started researching NET Carcinoma and joined support groups.  The general consensus was 1. That we absolutely needed to meet with a NET Specialist and  2.  Cisplatin never works on NETs.  It was tough convincing my mom, but we finally got her in to see one of the most renowned specialists, who just happened to operate out of Vanderbilt, only about five hours away.  She was too sick to even hold her head up to talk to him, she was in a wheel chair, and she ended up in the hospital for a week on our way home from our appointment.  He did give us a new plan though and confirmed that the harsh chemo just wasn’t working.

All this time though, the cancer hasn’t grown.  It hasn’t really changed at all.  We are told it will never go away, surgery will never be an option, but it can be controlled.  After a few months of a break, my mom started the plan spelled out by the specialist, a much milder chemo treatment.  She can walk again and has control over her body.  She calls us on the phone, plays with her grand girl, goes for walks, craves food, goes to church….all of these things we thought would never happen again. If any good came out of all of this, it would be that it brought us all closer to God.  We prayed more than ever before.  We saw his beauty in all of our friends through their support and kindness.  We realized that he can make the impossible happen in ways that never even occurred to us.  We were so caught up on wanting the cancer gone that we never thought about finding a way to make life manageable with the cancer.