Tuesday, February 10, 2015

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 26th, 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.

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