A Singer's Perspective on Cancer

As someone who fought cancer while growing a baby inside of me, there were about a million side effects that I struggled with. I had morning sickness and chemo sickness. I had pregnancy fatigue and chemo fatigue. I had gestational diabetes due to steroid therapy, along with a constant craving for sweets due to both the pregnancy and the steroids. I could spend all day listing the symptoms and side effects I endured, and the list would have barely been started.

However, there's one no one warned me about. One that no one could've ever predicted. One that may never leave me.

You see, I've been a musician my whole life. I've spent more money studying music than most sane people would be able to guess. I have a degree in music that I sank tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours of my life into. My mother says I started singing to her when she was pregnant with me, and that I never really stopped. Singing was my passion; it was my whole life for most of my life.

Then I got cancer. The mass started in my chest and worked its way up to my esophagus, simultaneously cutting off my air supply and limiting my vocal range. It's hard to sing when you can't breathe or even get your vocal chords to work efficiently.

I used to be a worship pastor. I've lead worship services. I've sang in concerts that lasted over an hour. I've participated in rehearsals that lasted for three hours or more. I had a singing range that was the envy of anyone who understood what a singing range was.

My husband and I were transitioning between churches when I got cancer. I hadn't been employed in the music industry for quite a while, but I still sang for fun every chance I got.

But then...I literally couldn't sing anymore. I didn't talk about it. It wasn't really a secret, I just couldn't emotionally handle it. I couldn't even admit it to myself. I went a year with little to no music in my life before I was able to croak out anything again.

I am now in remission and can sing again. I still don't really have much of a range, and my lung capacity is still a joke. I'll probably never be musically employed or participate in a choir again. I probably wouldn't be able to, even if I wanted to.

But this isn't all sad. I've found a new use for my love of music.

My daughter was born two months early due to the cancer and subsequent treatments. She had a month-long stay in the NICU. From the first time I got to hold her, I started singing to her, and haven't stopped since. I sing to her when she wakes up in the morning. I sing to her when I put her down for a nap. I sing to her when I put her to sleep at night. Her life is now filled with music.

Singing to her, even if I feel like it's ridiculously substandard compared to the quality I used to be able to produce, has brought me more joy than any performance I have ever given. I can fill the joy of my life with the joy of my life. I can saturate my daughter's life with music, teach her to love it as much as I do.

I may never again have the range, endurance, or power that I used to have when I sing. I've come to realize there are certain things cancer can take from you and never give back. But I fought for something cancer couldn't take and never will: the love of daughter who brings me more joy than anything else ever could.

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. 

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!

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.