I had transferred to a new school district and was adjusting to it. School was school and I had begun making some good friends. By the time winter break rolled around I was relieved, but I didn't get to enjoy it much. Shortly after Christmas my tonsils swelled up and I had a mild fever. After a few days, the swelling went down and it was as if nothing had happened. I went back to school in January and the semester changed which meant that I had to take gym class. I was not looking forward to it. I soon became out of breath in gym class, having a hard time keeping up with even running laps. The funny thing is that even though less than a year before I had run track, I became tired when I climbed the stairs and could not for the life of me stay awake during my classes. Everything just seemed tired. Even my muscles. The morning after the winter concert for concert band, I got sick to my stomach. I triumphantly asked if I could stay home from school. There was a stomach flu that had been going around the school and apparently I had finally caught it. It seemed to go away as the day progressed, but then the next morning I felt awful again. This continued for a week until my mother's husband accused me of being truant because of something happening at school. I would feel bad in the morning and feel fine in the afternoon by the time my sister came home form school. Then he told my mother that I had to eat something if I wanted to go to the hospital. I remember we had kielbasa and tater tots that night and I enjoyed it. When my mother put me in the car, however, we had barely left the parking lot of our apartment building before I got sick. She took me back and put me in the bath. It must have killed her because she hates being around puke and here I did not manage to get the door open fast enough to the car and she had to clean it up and take care of me. That night she put me to bed and, thanks to her husband who was convinced it was all an act, I was ignored while my mother, sister, and my mother's husband continued their life without me.
I became weaker and could not hold down even water. I would take a few sips and have to crawl back to the bathroom to expel it. Eventually I would even have to take a break in crawling because I became so weak and dehydrated. One day, about two weeks after I stayed that first day of staying home, I crawled out of the bedroom my sister and I shared and watched cartoons with her. She had frozen some grape juice for me so I could have something in my system. My mother came walking in, although it was only a little after 3pm and she worked until 5. She told me to get up because she was taking me to a doctor. She helped me dress, putting on the purple jeans that I had received for Christmas a little more than two months before. It was March 9, 1994. There was thick snow on the ground with an icy layer because there had been a little bit of frozen rain. My mother had to help carry me because I didn't have the strength to walk by myself. I had fallen down in the snow before she realized that I would need help. I had to hold onto my pants because they were falling off me.
We got to the pediatrician's office where they weighed me and took a blood test. They told me that I weighed 124 pounds. My normal weight was 150 lbs. The doctor came back into the room where my mother and I waited and he told me I was anemic. I thought this was the same as sickle cell anemia and I began crying. He told me that I could get a transfusion that would take care of this. Then he said that there was something else in my blood that he didn't have the equipment to handle so he had already called Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati to let them know that we were coming and to have a room ready for me.
When we got to CHMC, a phlembotomist drew even more blood from me and made me take a pregnancy test before they did an x-ray on my abdomen. I was moved into ACU, the acute care unit on the 5th floor of Children's, and put into protecive isolation which meant that my mother had to wash her hands before she could touch me and I had t wear a mask if I left my room. My room was bright and colorful and had sliding glass doors in the front with curtains. I could see the elephant house at the Cincinnati Zoo from my room's little window. I was in a room with brightly colored zoo animals on a wallpaper border around the ceiling and matching furniture and curtains. I had a TV where I watched the Muppet show and All My Children with my mother while she stayed with me during the day and night and slept on a sofa in my room. They put me on an IV for fluids and gave me several pints of red blood cells which hurt because they were never warmed up. The nurses would put a warm washcloth on my hand where the sight was to alleviate the pain, but it still hurt.
The doctors would do rounds every morning. My doctor, Dr. Margeret Masterson was a tall redhead with large hands and a voice that was reminscent of Julia Childs. She was very nice. My personal nurse was Jenny who I still adore. My favorite attendant was Lashawn who insisted that I call him LA because he thought Lashawn sounded like a girl's name. There was a psychologist and a social worker who traveled among the group of doctors checking on children. On Friday, March 11, 1994, my mother and I had noticed that the doctors had skipped over my room that morning and continued their rounds as if I weren't there. We joked about it, but I think we both felt a little uneasy about their looking in to my room and then talking again as they walked by with the residents continuing to look in at us. Then after the doctors finished their rounds, they came back to my room.
"How do you feel today?" asked Dr. Masterson. She usually flipped through her clipboard as she said this, but today she focused only on me.
"Pretty good," I answered.
"That's good. We need to speak with your mother outside for a few minutes, okay?"
"Okay."
I am not sure if someone stayed inside with me to keep me distracted. Probably, but I don't remember because after those doors slide close, my eyes were fixed on what was happening outside. Dr. Masterson was talking to my mother who looked back at me, then began crying. One of the people, the child psychologist or the social worker, put her hand on my mother's shoulder and Dr. Masterson slid the doors open again and everyone came back in. My mother stepped to the front. She was still sobbing audibly and her tears came through her voice:
"You have cancer," she sobbed. Dr. Masterson nodded to her and began to explain that I had been diagnosed with a poor prognosis of acute lymphocytic leukemia and that I was lucky that I had come in when I did because if we had waited a week longer there wouldn't have been anything they could have done. I was to start intensive treatment on Monday, beginning with surgery to have a chest catheter put in so I wouldn't need to get stuck all the time for IVs that I would be receiving on a daily basis for the next two months, a bone marrow biopsy, and a spinal tap where I would receive my first chemotherapy drug, cytosine arabinocide through my spinal cord. I was going to do sessions of cranial radiation. I would later respond very well to the medicines which would reduce my treatment by six months, lose my hair the day after my last radiation session, and resent the pity that people gave me because I was a childhood cancer patient. But that day, I called my best friend Charlene who came to see me the next day with some friends of ours, and told my mother that everything was going to be okay. There I was, a 14-year-old girl who just found out how close she was to having terminal cancer, comforting her mother who was much more upset about it than she was.
Go back See a picture of me after I lost my hair