Revenge of the Bad Days

I’m progressing further into my pregnancy. I’m almost into my third trimester now. This has led to an overabundance of raging pregnancy hormones in my body, which makes it harder than ever to handle the bad days.

Sometimes I’m still not convinced people even believe I have these bad days. And I don’t want people thinking I’m something I’m not. I deal with the same fears and doubts and insecurities that every cancer patient does. I try my best to be positive about this situation every chance I get, but sometimes I’m just downright scared. Sometimes I feel like I’m back in that hospital room where the news was first handed to me, dealing with the same unknown factors I was then, worried about what’s going to happen to my husband, my baby, my family, if the worst should happen.

I’m not back in that hospital room. I know I have every reason to believe that the baby and I will come through this just perfectly and stronger than ever. But when the pregnancy hormones are raging, when the steroids also take my emotions for a joy ride, when steroids also rob me of my sleep…I just can’t reason my way through all this anymore. Add to that chemo brain. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, it’s a side effect of chemo treatments. You become robbed of your short term memory and reasoning skills. Sometimes it takes me five minutes to think of one word, if that word even comes to me then. Sometimes I’ll be in the middle of a sentence talking to someone and will completely forget what the conversation is even about. I also have pregnancy brain on top of this, which is essentially the same thing as chemo brain.

Sometimes it just feels like I’m losing my mind.

And now I’m getting closer to labor and delivery. I don’t even know when that’ll be. I have an official due date but I’ve been told I won’t carry that long. They want to induce so the doctors will have as much control over the situation as possible because my case is so risky. With my immune system being compromised because of cancer and cancer treatments, we have to be careful how we go about this. There’s also the fact that I’m on blood thinners. There’s also the fact that I have gestational diabetes due to steroids. So…my doctors have to fight it out amongst themselves as to when they want to deliver the baby based on how I’m breathing (between the mass and the baby pushing on my internal organs) and how big the baby is getting.

There is so much to worry and be scared about right now.

So the bad days have become more frequent. I keep fighting through them as well as I can but honestly…I’m kind of just ready to get labor (which sounds scarier all the time) over with so I can finish treatments and get back to my life. Get down to the business of being a mother. I know my life will never be the same as it was. I will have a child and will deal with cancer after care for the rest of my life. I’ve heard that the cancer and some of the treatments leave life long side effects, too.

So I’ll find a new normal eventually. 

I’m so grateful for all the encouragement I get from everyone in my life. I’m grateful for my amazing husband who has so selflessly been putting up with all my crazy and helping and supporting me through all of this. I’m grateful for my parents who make come as often as they can to take me to treatments and help my husband and I take care of the house and get it ready for the baby. And then there’s my husband’s mother who comes on the weekends as often as she can for the same purpose. My brother’s wife, who is a nurse, has plans to be here after the birth so she can help during treatments and take care of the baby as well.

I feel guilty for having bad days when I have so much going on to be thankful for, and so many people helping out and praying for me.

Maybe I should focus on that instead.

​Why I Joke About Having Cancer

It has come to my attention that a lot of people are made uncomfortable by my level of comfort with the fact that I have cancer. It has also been brought up that some people are in fact offended by the fact that not only am I remarkably comfortable with this state of being, but I also tend to make a lot of jokes about it. Now I understand that some people will always be offended by this sort of thing, but I'd like to explain my side of things.

I have cancer. I have cancer and one of the most sarcastic senses of humor you can imagine. I've always dealt with hard things in my life with that sense of humor in tact whenever I could. It's not a defense mechanism, and I'm not avoiding dealing with anything. Seriously, I have cancer. You can't really be in denial for very long about that even if you want to. 

But that's also no reason to go through the process angry or sad or depressed all the time. Yes, bad days happen. I've spoken about that before. But happiness is a state of mind, not a set of circumstances, and I made up my mind the very first day that I was going to handle this with as much humor and strength as I could possibly muster.

So...enter cancer jokes.

Like for real, I made a cancer joke that very first day when I was told how rare my diagnosis is. I told the room that I find it funny that I can't even do cancer normally. Right there from my hospital bed.

I joke about having cancer because my situation is so cosmically unlikely to happen. I joke about it because at times if I can't see the humor in what's happening to me, I'd get lost in the despair of what's happening to me. You make your own choices about how you respond to the situations in your life. I choose laughter.

I do not take my situation lightly. I don’t take cancer lightly at all. I realize, I dare say more than many people, the gravity of this situation. That is arguably why I joke about it. I’ve been told by many medical professionals that my attitude about this situation will go a long way towards aiding in my healing. I don’t think it’s just a myth that facing illness with a positive attitude and a sense of humor helps you get better. I’ve witnessed it in my own life.

My papa (grandfather on my mother’s side) has had a plethora of medical issues for many years now. He has been told several times for one reason or another that he didn’t have long to live, and he has outlived the timeline given by every single doctor to tell him that. Every time he faces a new ailment he faces it with his head held high and a smart remark in his arsenal (I get my sense of humor from him). Just days before I was diagnosed, my papa had to have one of his legs amputated. When he was given the news, he immediately started making jokes about his socks lasting twice as long now. 

My papa is my hero.

If I can face the entirety of this cancer journey with as much good humor as my papa has faced everything he’s been through, I think I’ll consider this a success. I think it’s situations like this that show who you really are as a person, anyway. I want to be the type of person who manages to see the good in any situation and keeps my good humor regardless of my life’s circumstances. 

The Road So Far

Sometimes it feels as though I’ve had cancer all my life. Like I’ve been living with this diagnosis from the time I was born. Sometimes it feels like I was just told yesterday, and like I’m still adjusting to the new realities of my life. In reality, it hasn’t even been three months yet since I received the news. I guess there has just been that much activity.

Right now I’m still in somewhat of a holding pattern as far as the battle is concerned. I have received four rituxan treatments so far, which is part of the chemo cocktail but not a chemo treatment in and of itself, and one full chemo treatment, as well. We are still taking the chemo treatments one step at a time because they don’t want my blood levels to get to far off, which is a big concern for my doctors. I was anemic before we started chemo, and they’re worried if we do too much chemo, I might have to get a blood transfusion. And there is of course the ever-present goal of making sure the baby is ok!

As far as the progression of the cancer itself, we received the amazing news a few weeks ago that the rituxan treatments were able to shrink the mass by a full third! We and the doctors were all amazed by this, as they were simply hoping that the rituxan would simply hold the mass off and buy us more time before starting chemo. Now I’m excited to see just how much progress we can make against the cancer with the full chemo treatments!

I’ve been able to take myself off my oxygen a bit since the mass shrank. The mass was situated in my chest in such a way that it was pushing on my heart and lungs, making it difficult for me to breathe. Since it shrank I’m able to go quite a while without needing assistance to breathe, even when I’m up and moving around. My energy levels and weight have still been fluctuating quite a bit, and my eating is erratic at best from week to week, but every ultrasound we’ve done of the baby shows that she is growing at a perfect rate, so as long as that keeps up my doctors say we should be ok!

So that’s a bit of an update on me so far. I am currently 20 weeks pregnant, the baby is growing nicely and the cancer is shrinking nicely. We have so much to be thankful for on this journey, despite how terrifying it sometimes can seem. One of these days I will sit down and simply write a blog about how much we really do have to be thankful for, an itemized list of how blessed we’ve been even with a cancer diagnosis.

Top Three Things to Never Say to a Woman Who is Pregnant and Has Cancer

I get the feeling that people fall into one of two camps where this topic is concerned. Either they think these comments are either completely innocent or they consider it unthinkable to even consider saying or asking someone in my situation these things. So I’m going to approach this from a humorous/sarcastic standpoint, trying to avoid seriously offending anyone who may or may not have made these comments to me. But it still needs to be said, so here we go!

1) The offending question: did you know you had cancer when you got pregnant?

a.      The snarky answer: Are you freaking serious!? Yes, OF COURSE I wanted to bring an innocent child into the line of fire here! It’s not enough that MY life is at stake here, why not endanger an innocent baby in the meantime, making this WHOLE process harder on me (and the aforementioned innocent infant) than it has to be!!

b.      Real talk time: Seriously, this brings into serious question my sanity, and also raises questions as to whether someone should call child welfare on me instantaneously. It’s incredibly offensive to imply that I would intentionally do something like that, whether the person asking the question realizes it or not. Just…think first, k? K.

    2) The offending question: will any of this (treatments/tests/procedures/etc) hurt/endanger the baby?

a.      The snarky answer: Oh yeah, definitely. And? If I have to go down, might as well take someone with me!!

b.      Real talk time: everything that we have done and are going to do is only done because the benefits outweighed the risk, usually because the alternative was ME FREAKING DYING!! Believe it or not, same as me not intentionally bringing a child into the world under these conditions, I do not, in fact, exactly relish the idea of putting said child into danger during the one time this poor child is supposed to be the safest she’ll ever be in her life. The fact that she’s instead possibly in the greatest danger she’ll ever be in breaks my heart. But if we were to do nothing, the alternative is me dying, in which case she would die too. And the thought of that breaks my heart even more.

    3) Why aren’t you working/what do you even do all day?

a.      The snarky answer: Work is overrated and boring and getting cancer to get out of it seemed like so much more fun! Seriously, who wouldn’t want to stay at some battling cancer/pregnant/and treatment side effect symptoms day in and day out, all day every day!? As to what I do, obviously just take advantage of this time to be lazy all day because I’m definitely not busy fighting cancer and growing a baby and dealing with all the pain and discomfort that implies. It’s like a party every day of my life right now!

b.      Real talk time: friends, growing a baby is freaking HARD. Fighting cancer is harder. Doing both at once at the same time is nearly impossible. And I wasn’t kidding when I was talking about all the symptoms I have to deal with. In fact, my immune system is pretty much completely shot at this point in time. You see, the cancer is in my immune system, and some of my treatments compromise it even more. That was one of the deciding factors in my doctors ordering me to stay home while battling cancer. I can’t even go out very often because I have to avoid places with lots of people. (Also I’m on oxygen and going out is a huge hassle anyway, lol.)

Obviously most the time these questions are not asked from a malicious place. But they do get burdensome to answer after a while, especially the ones that unwittingly call into question my very humanity. And sometimes I don’t take offense at all if it’s coming from someone I’m close to, or if it’s obvious that they don’t mean it in a bad way and are genuinely wondering. But sometimes you can just tell it’s being asked from a place of morbid curiosity, which leaves me feeling like some circus sideshow, or just feeling like a horrible person.

So the moral of the story here is, think long and hard about whether you should be asking these questions, or at the very least think about the way you are presenting these questions.
Sometimes it’s better for everyone to just not know.

Diagnosis: "Fat"

This may be the hardest blog I’ve ever written. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about my weight or body image issues, because being open and honest about your insecurities tends to open you up to more ridicule and criticism, and that’s a dangerous thing to do, especially on the internet. However, I feel like maybe if I’m honest about what happened to me as a result of fat-shaming, it might save someone else from going through the same thing. And if I can help anybody out, it’ll be worth any criticism or ridicule. In my present condition I’m kind of past worrying about my own vanity anyway. There are much more important things to worry about.

I’ve been doing a lot of looking back recently. Most of the time I’m either trying to figure out when the cancer started, or I’m judging myself for not realizing I had cancer earlier, now that I can look back and spot all the symptoms. It’s not a healthy practice at all, but I have a lot of free time on my hands now that my official job title is “Cancer Fighter.” And what I’ve realized during the moments of reminiscing is…I spent so much time fat shaming myself, and letting one doctor do the same, that I put my own life at risk. 

You see, some of the major symptoms of my type of cancer (that I personally went through) are fatigue, unexplained weight loss, difficulty breathing, difficulty swallowing, and night sweats. The defining trend with all of those symptoms is that they can also easily be attributed to being overweight, or at least a lot of them can. And when you’re overweight and start losing weight, even unintentionally, you tend not to question it, and your doctors tend to encourage it.

So that is where I was for several months. What turned out to be fatigue due to cancer was something that I was ashamed of because I thought I was just overweight and lazy. I needed to work out more, right? I obviously just needed to build up my stamina. 

The difficulty breathing was another issue all together. I had a pretty bad upper respiratory infection in September. I actually started seeing a pulmonologist at that time, because of that infection and because I tend to have chronic upper respiratory problems anyway. This particular infection left me with a residual cough that lasted several months afterwards, and that’s what lead me to discovering what I for months referred to as “the lump in my throat.” The pulmonologist ran all kinds of tests on me, including two different lung capacity tests, the second one about two months after the first. The second test showed my lungs working at only 50% capacity, down from about 80% at the first.

The doctor thought this was simply because of my weight. I accepted that explanation.

By the time I received my diagnosis, I had lost over 10% of my body weight. I had been battling crippling fatigue for months. I did have other symptoms that could not be explained away with a diagnosis of being fat (like the fact that I couldn’t even swallow fluids anymore), and that’s what finally lead me to seeking medical attention. 

One of the few good things about my diagnosis is how I now have a logical explanation for everything I’d been struggling with for so long. And the explanation has nothing to do with my size. I can now look back and recognize that even with being overweight, I was actually in pretty good health before the cancer started. If only I had believed that.

So I guess my point in writing all of this is to first of all work through my regret in not listening to my body. While I may never have come up with “cancer” being the reason for everything, I definitely could have recognized that there was something seriously wrong if I hadn’t been so busy being ashamed of myself. Secondly, to let anyone else going through anything similar to this know that they’re not alone. I have heard other stories like mine. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Fat doesn’t always equal unhealthy, and whatever size we find ourselves at, we know our bodies well enough to know when there’s an issue that has nothing to do with weight. Maybe we just need to learn to trust ourselves rather than sit in silence due to shame.

Regarding the Bad Days

Some days are worse than others. I’ve already written a blog about how I’m not strong. I meant every word of it. I’m not strong. I get through everything because I don’t have a choice. I have cancer whether I like it or not and I have to deal with it the best way I possibly can, moment by moment and day by day.

Some days…my best is worse than it is on other days. Wednesday was one of those days for me.

You see the thing is, I have so many diagnoses right now, and so many medications to try to control everything going on with me, that between the symptoms of the diagnoses and the side effects of the medications, not to mention just plain being pregnant, my body feels like it’s part of some kind of sadistic science experiment from hell. And I’m not saying that just to use gratuitous profanity, I honestly feel like hell is the only place that could possibly come up with the stuff I deal with at times.

And it’s hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever dealt with. Some days all my symptoms are worse than others. Wednesday was like that. Some days I am faced with debilitating, crippling fatigue. I’m talking like the kind of fatigue that starts in the center of your being and spreads throughout your entire body, even to the extremities of your fingertips, to where even simple tasks like keeping yourself fed and hydrated become more than you can handle.

Those days are the hardest. And that kind of fatigue is my most common symptom. It’s worse some days than others. Sometimes the steroids I’m on mask the fatigue and I’m more mentally alert even while my body is still tired. Those days are easier to handle because it’s easier to talk myself through it.

Other days…I just let it happen. I let the fatigue happen. I let the pity party happen. Sometimes it just has to so that you can move on. I’ll be honest, I spent a huge part of Wednesday just feeling sorry for myself. A lot of “Why me?” prayers were prayed. I had an emotional meltdown or two.

I’m not proud of it. However, I’m also not ashamed. It’s OK to have a moment of weakness every now and then, regardless of what you’re going through. You don’t have to have a cancer diagnosis during pregnancy (or just a cancer diagnosis in general) in order to earn the right to have a meltdown.

Life is freaking hard sometimes.

The trick is what you do once the meltdown is over, once that day is over, once that week is over, if that’s what it takes!

I took the day off. Then I dusted myself off and got started all over again. I got back into the fight. One bad day, one emotional meltdown, one horrible diagnosis doesn’t have to define how you handle the entire situation. The only way that happens is if you let it and quit fighting, and that can only happen if you forget what you’re fighting for. And there’s always so much to fight for!

My Ramblings about Healing

As a Christian, I’ve done a lot of thinking about my beliefs on healing in the last few months. Divine healing. Miraculous healing would be another word for it. Or supernatural.

There are dozens and dozens of scriptures about God’s healing. I’m not going to get into all of them here because the point of this particular ramble is not to argue the theology of whether or not God’s healing is possible. As a Christian, I know and believe all of these scriptures. There is not a single doubt in my mind that God can and will instantaneously heal me if he so chooses. I pray for that daily.

But I also believe there’s more to the story. As a Christian, I have also witnessed instances where God doesn’t heal. I don’t pretend to know why this happens, but I refuse to believe that this happens because of a lack of faith, or because they didn’t pray right, or because they didn’t have enough people praying for them. I refuse to even consider that there’s some kind of equation involved that you have to discover and stick with when it comes to God’s healing. I don’t think there is a magic combination of words you have to mutter in prayer in just that right order at just the right time with just the right amount of faith.

Let’s be real. I wouldn’t serve a God like that.

What I really want to address right now, however, is the middle ground. That place between God not healing, and God instantaneously healing. That part where you are sick long term (in my case pregnant and cancerous). And right now I'm staring  down the barrel of a long journey of potentially painful treatments that will poison my body in order to heal my body, endless doubts and fears, and the simple terrifying ordeal that we call the “unknown.”

Because in my case, in my personal journey so far with cancer, I believe 100% that I’m going to be healed. I’ve never doubted for even a second that God is going to bring me through this. There’s no way this is the end of the road for me. I just don't know exactly how that's going to happen.

I pray every day for healing, instantaneous if that’s what God wants to do, but I also pray for endurance if I have to “take the long way around.” This healing process isn’t about instant gratification. It’s about faith. Sure, I ask questions of God when I’m still cancerous at every appointment. Questioning everything is a side effect of cancer. I wonder sometimes why God’s taking me the long way. I think God is OK with those questions though. And even if I don’t receive an answer (or instant gratification), I still have faith that there is a reason for what I’m going through.

Instant healing is obviously a major faith booster for anyone who has ever experienced or witnessed it. But how much more faith does it take to have faith when you have to make the decision to believe for your healing every day when you wake up and are still ill? I have to make that decision every day, every time I have to take one of my dozens of pills, or injections, or have to take my blood sugar to monitor my brand new gestational diabetes diagnosis (thank you, steroids), or see the changes happening in my body due to the cancer or the treatments or the numerous side effects of anything and everything I just listed. I have to decide to have faith every time I hook myself up to the oxygen because my heart rate shoots through the roof and I get light headed without it.

I don’t pretend to understand why I’m going through this. I don’t pretend to know the theology behind suffering. I could write an entire blog about that alone and still not have any good answers for either me or anyone else out there suffering, or even those watching a loved one suffer.

What I do know that my past sufferings have always left me a better person on the other side, and I intend for this to be another part of that pattern. 

On Facing New Labels

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life thinking about labels. We all have lots of labels. Among mine have been daughter, sister, wife, student, etc. And with every life change comes new labels.

For example, one of the hardest “new labels” I had ever had to adjust to was “divorcee.” A lot of you know this story, and I’ve written it in earlier blogs for those of you who care to read it. I remember the first time so many years ago when I realized I would carry the label “divorced” around with me for the rest of my life. It was like having an out of body experience. My first marriage happened when I was so young, full of ideas about how perfect the rest of my life would be, and completely naïve about the true nature of the person I was marrying. Plus, being deeply religious, divorce was never even seen as an option. So when it came to be applied to me, all I could think of what how hateful and ugly a word it was, and how much I hated it being stuck to me now.

Well…I got used to it. And since then I have even more new labels. I am a wife again, to the most amazing person I could hope to spend the rest of my life with. And very recently I have acquired the label of “pregnant.”

I was still adjusting to the “pregnant” thing. I am still adjusting to it even now, to be honest. I’m only barely almost through my first trimester.

Then the bomb dropped.

The word “cancer” was dropped.

“Cancer patient” may be the hardest label I will ever adjust to. It took me almost two days to say “I have cancer” out loud. I’ll always remember the first time I did. I was still in the hospital, and Daniel and I were alone and getting ready for bed and I just came out and said it. “I have cancer.” Sometimes I still lay awake at night with those words going through my head, trying to make them real to me.

“Pregnant cancer patient.” That’s my new label now. I’ll never again get to have just “pregnant” describe me, because from here on out with the battle raging in my body there will be no way to differentiate the two. The battle for my own life is linked to the battle for my baby’s life.

I look forward to the day that the baby and I will both get to have the label “cancer survivors.”

Setting the Record Straight

I keep hearing people talk about how brave or strong I am in this situation right now. Well today I want to set the record straight. I am neither brave nor strong. I have cancer growing in my chest and a baby growing in my belly. This situation does not leave room for much more than just blind desperation, which right now I have lots of.

Bravery or strength at a time like this isn’t something that you choose. I have not made an active choice to not melt down every time I have a spare moment to think about what I’m going through. When I was hospitalized that very first day, when I was told how big the growth was, when I was told the various things they thought it might be, I was scared. Of course I was scared. I knew that any number of the procedures they might have to do could harm my baby. I was scared for my baby.

Yet somehow, I also always felt peace. I had no idea how long I was going to be stuck in that hospital room (it almost ended up being two full weeks), and I had no idea what the outcome of the tests would be. But every night in that hospital before going to bed, Daniel and I prayed together. I didn’t pray for a specific diagnosis. I didn’t pray for anything except for my baby. I begged for the life of my child, however that had to come about.

It’s desperation. And it’s the grace of God.

Everything I went through in that hospital, the CT’s, the biopsies, the MRI, all of it was because I knew that the doctors had to know what they were dealing with to make sure the baby and I make it through this alive.

It was terrifying. I went into all of it with as good an attitude as I could, but inside I was crying with fear. There were times that I cried before the tests were administered. I screamed during the bone marrow biopsy. I cried when they tried to put a feeding tube in me and couldn’t because the mass in my throat was too big.

But during all of that, there was a song playing in my head. You see, I was in Jazz Band at MidAmerica Nazarene University. I was a singer. We did this song, which I believe was an old spiritual. I had a solo at the beginning, and the words simply went like this:

I want Jesus to walk with me.      
I want Jesus to talk with me.
All along this pilgrim journey.
Oh I want my Jesus to walk with me.

I held onto this song and those words as if I were drowning and they were my lifeline. I still play it in my head anytime I feel the panic rising in me. There is so much uncertainty and so much to worry about right now, and all I can really think to ask for right now is simply that Jesus be here through all of this, protecting both me and the baby.

I’m not brave. I’m a mom. And I’m desperate.

In Which Beth Completely Shifts Gears and Starts Chronicling her Pregnant Cancer Journey...

It’s still incredible to me, this “cancer” thing. I realize at some point most people think about the possibility of getting cancer, and most people probably do what I did and brush it off with the cliché “it can never happen to me,” or at most, think of it as the possibly the thing that will finally take them from this earth when they are older and have lived out their life already.

But this? This was never a scenario I had considered. Being diagnosed at 27 years old, barely married for over a year, and pregnant with my first child. Pregnant. I am pregnant, with cancer. For reasons I won’t go into here, I had very legitimate concerns about my ability to even get pregnant for a while. So when I found out my husband Daniel and I had conceived so quickly with so little problems, I was overjoyed. I felt like God’s hand was all over my child, my marriage, and my life. After everything I’ve been through in my life, things were going about as well as I could have ever hoped.

Then this lump, which had been in my neck for a few months by that point, started becoming an alarming problem. I had been to the doctor about it. We were looking into it. I had looked stuff up online and obviously the word “cancer” appeared because of course it did. But there were so many other, way more likely things it could be. So while the lump was feeling like it was getting bigger, and I was having more and more problems swallowing and eating in general, I only seriously gave thought to the possibility of having cancer a few times.

Then on January 26^th, after several weeks of severe morning sickness and almost being hospitalized for that a few times, I woke up with my throat hurting so badly from what I assumed was the mass that after a few hours at work I had to leave and go to the emergency room. I stopped by Daniel’s office so he could go with me, and less than two hours later I was admitted into the hospital and told that the mass was 15 centimeters long and that they were going to have to biopsy it. A week later I was diagnosed with mediastinal diffuse large b cell lymphoma.

To say I was crushed, terrified, and scared for mine and my baby’s lives wouldn’t even begin to express to you everything that went through my heart at that time. While part of me demanded to be strong because I had the baby to think of, part of me also dissolved into sheer panic because I have the baby to think of. The only thing in those first moments to keep me sane was my incredible family gathered around me and the only prayer I could come up with at the time: “God…please…”

Over the course of the rest of that week I went through even more tests to determine the stage of the cancer. More ultrasounds, an MRI, and even a bone marrow biopsy, which I can say with absolute certainty was the most terrifying and painful experience I’ve had thus far in this journey. By the grace of God, all of those tests came back clear. They did one last ultrasound on our precious baby, and my mother and husband got to see the little one move, and everything looked as good as any normal baby could.

So now I’ve been sent home to begin steroid treatments and try to boost my appetite and eating. A symptom of my type of cancer is appetite and weight loss, and adding the location of the mass by my esophagus, along with the severe morning sickness, I lost an alarming amount of weight in an incredibly short time. We’ll be starting chemo in a few weeks, and that’s going to also add to the difficulty of getting enough nutrients for the baby and I during this time.

There are also concerns about my immune system. The cancer is in my immune system, and on top of that, steroids compromise your immune system. So while I’m at home for the treatments I also have to be super careful and rethink how I live my entire life in order to avoid getting infections for mine and my baby’s sake.

So that’s the abridged summary of everything that is going on right now. My oncologist, OB, and team of doctors are working as hard as they can together to get the baby and I through this as healthily as possible. My friends and family mean everything to me right now, and Daniel and I would be lost without them. This is going to be one of the biggest challenges we may ever be faced with, but I look forward to the day we can look back on this and say it was also the thing that brought us closer together that either of us ever imagined possible.