Nancy Dake

After a month of intermittent, mildly uncomfortable, period-like pains in my lower abdomen I scheduled a visit with my general physician.  He had been treating me with HRT for a few years in an effort to control various menopausal symptoms that I was having as I moved through the complete cessation of my periods over this last year.  So when he saw me on May 16th he ordered a CT scan and colonoscopy due to the fact the pain had been there for a length of time.  On May 19th, a Friday, we took the day off of work and my husband and I left to go camping for our 39th anniversary.  We returned home the next morning, on our anniversary because I was in too much pain.  On May 21st I went into the Shawano emergency room and they found a 14 cm tumor around my ovaries and uterus. 

So this is when I became a cancer patient...

The weeks that followed were consumed with a surgery to remove the tumor, a surgery to install a port, some recuperation time, and finally a colonoscopy.  That is the day they found tumor two, a one inch tumor located about 18” into my large intestines. 

 My condition had suddenly gone from Stage 2 Ovarian Cancer to Stage 4 Colon Cancer.  On June 08 I was told succinctly by my oncologist that my condition was “Incurable, but treatable”.  When you hear these words the blood leaves your face, you feel as though you will pass out.  Then my poor husband and I sat saddened and overwhelmed as a perky nurse took us through a paper trail of all the medical horrors of chemo side effects, highlighting with her bright fluorescent marker as she went.  Capping and uncapping the marker so many times I didn’t even hear what she was saying after about 10 minutes.  They called it “an education session”. 

Welcome to the world of oncology!       
 

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,
A poet, a pawn and a king.
I’ve been up and down and over and out,
And I know one thing.
Each time I find myself flat on my face,
I just pick myself up and get back in the race.