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.