April Alexander

   Hello everyone, thanks for visiting my site. I hope you come back regularly to read my entries. I am a 26 year old mother of two. My son is now 6 years old and my daughter is  2  years old. I first found my lump when I was 7 months pregnant with my daughter. They thought it was a clogged milk duct sense I was pregnant at the time. So my OBGYN told me that after I had my daughter to pump and the lump would go away. Well that didn't happen so I quit pumping. When my daughter was about 5 or 6 months old the lump went from being the size of a pea to a size of a large grade  A egg and it got really painful for me. So I went into the ER and the Dr. said I needed to get a scan done right away because of how big it was. But this was in the middle of the night so I came back the next day and they did a ultrasound and a biopsy of it. Two days later I get a phone call from my surgeon and she told me that I had stage 3 breast cancer. I went to North Memorial were they did a PET scan and started chemotherapy. I did chemo, radiation, a double mastectomy and had 8 of my lymph nodes removed and out of those 8 only 1 had cancer left in it.

  I finished all of that in December of 2018 and thought I was in the clear. So I started my breast reconstruction and my surgeon told me that not to be alarmed when I develop and red rash on my right chest because I had radiation there. Well that red rash turned into a type of what we thought at first was shingles. So I did the shingles medication. When that didn't clear it up my Dr. tried two different types of antibiotics and this was in the time frame of March of 2019 to May of 2019. Finally my Dr. was like I'm sorry April I don't know what this is so I am sending you to a skin Dr. Well I went and saw the skin Dr. when he first looked at it he was like ok lets do a biopsy of it and he left the room. Well when he came back the look on his face had changed and my fiancé and I knew that it wasn't gonna be good news when we got the results. Well two days later that Dr. called and of course I missed his phone call so I stayed up all night just to call him right at 8 am the next day. And we were right my cancer had came back and it was now stage 4 breast cancer. So I went and had another PET scan done but this time we found out that the cancer wasn't only on my chest wall it was now in my lungs and on my liver. But on top of that we found out that I was also pregnant. So I had to have an abortion done and I do not believe in doing that but I had to for my health. That was one of worse pains I had to ever go through not only mentally because I woke up when she was doing it but physically it was painful just knowing that, that Dr. was ripping your child out of you. 

   But now I have started Chemo again and I have had nothing but problems from my port getting infected and having to have that removed and getting two different PICC lines put in and both of them go infected too. To my tissue expanders getting infected and having to have them removed to now not even two weeks ago I just found out that I have 12 tumors in my brain and that biggest tumor that they found in my brain was 12mm big and that's big for being in my brain.

   I am trying to stay strong not only for myself but for my kids and my fiancé. I know that this is not easy for them to have to go through. I never thought in a million years that I would be 26 years old and dying of breast cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer and now brain cancer. Please everyone keep me and my family in your prayers.