My first cancer appeared on September 11, 2001. The day World Trade Center was attacked was the exact moment I was diagnosed with my first bout of Breast Cancer. It’s a day the world will never forget, and a day I have relived a thousand times as I worked my way back to a healthy body and healthy mind. Now, 15 years later with two more cancers invading my body simultaneously, I can look back and read my journal with more distance. When first discovering cancer it’s scary, it’s confusing, and it’s not so easy to digest. While co-creation was something you do with others, cancer, at least in my early understanding of it, was something I would do alone – or so I thought.
But something unexpected started to happen that even my doctors called a miracle. Miracles are “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”
I got through the double mastectomy in a few months, and expected healing from it was going to be easy. My mind was set for healing and my family support was high. Yet for some strange reason, I didn’t have the healing experience. I started to lose weight, became jaundice, and felt deep pains under my breast – giving me no other choice than to put myself in the hospital for a thorough examination of what was causing the new illnesses – new pain, weight loss, and appetite loss.
Miracles do happen – and the right doctors showed up as though I had a direct line of sight to each one…. I’d put myself into the hospital for tests, and tests I got – but from a Gastroenterologist who was filling in for another general physician (who likely would not have seen the signs that my internal health was being compromised).
“You are jaundice” and, “we must operate today”. The operation meant putting in a stent so we could move bile into my liver to digest my food. But what caused the jaundice, and what cause the bile ducts to close down? More exploration to find the trail leading back to – what we learned was Pancreatic Cancer.
Feeling the pain under my chest – I knew something was not right – yet the only way to give eyes to the pain was MRIs and other body scans. Within 12 hours we had the story laid out in front of us.., “You have a 4.4 cm tumor wrapped around your pancreas. 4.4 is big, and it’s lethally big. It’s wrapped itself around the veins and arteries at the top of the pancreas, rendering it inoperable.”
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