It is important to know about what was happening in my life before my diagnosis!!! My theory (remember I am a scientist and we all have to have our theories right!) was it started when I had pneumonia. When my son, Steven, was six he got mono and being the dedicated mom I stayed up with him at night when he was throwing up several times. He was sick for about a month and when he got well, of course, I got pneumonia. It decided to settle in, you guessed it, my lower left lobe of my lung. So being a mother of a six-year-old and a four-year-old I took off a month and just relaxed and took care of myself. Yeah right! In reality, I went back to my 40 hr/wk job and continued taking care of my kids without really addressing the pneumonia and how much it had depleted my body. I never really technically took care myself so in that lower left lobe of my lung for eight years an exciting new chapter of my life was being brewed. (Remember this is my theory but I think after all I have learned it is a good solid theory. I will tell you why as we go!) I have learned that it is sooooo critical for our well being to take care of ourselves!! You don't have to stop everything to do it either. There are very simple tweeks that you can do for yourself that will help you in the long run!!
So let me step back to my story as, of course, I digress! For three years I went to conventional medicine to get my CT scans and to Dr. Allison to learn more about helping my body heal. And for those three years my body was clear. It was in the third year that I took an active role in messing up my body. After the third year of being clear I actually didn't have to go back for a scan for another year and I was thinking I'm free. And being the human that I was, I sort of started slipping back into my old habits as we humans tend to do and I started eating and drinking alcohol. After about a year, when I was supposed to go back for another scan, I had gone on a long weekend of eating junk and drinking too much and I had a stitch in my side. It was in my upper right right next to my liver/gall bladder area. I decided I should see the doctor as it was pretty persistent. Because of my previous lung cancer, they decided to go ahead and do an ultrasound of my liver to see what's going on. The ultrasound showed I had 10 spots on my liver. I was scheduled to do PET scans, CT scans, and MRIs. (The MRI on the brain was scary as heck). It turns out that my liver and bones lit up so I had cancer in those two areas. The lung cancer had metastsized to my liver and bones!
In order to find out exactly what cancer we were dealing with I had to do a liver biopsy. Nobody should ever, ever, ever have to go through the liver biopsy and to top it off I had to do it twice!! They did get the tissue and it turned out to be the carcinoid that I had in my lung. The carcinoid is a freaky little cancer. It is a NeuroEndorcrine Tumor or NET. If there is any good thing about this it is a slow-growing cancer. The bad thing is it is considered stage 4 when it is in the liver. Oh, I forgot to tell you that chemotheraphy does NOT work on carcinoids. They are just that freaky, unique and very rare! I did have to rely on conventional medicine to do radiation on my left hip as that is where the cancer was in my bones. It helped a lot to get rid of the pain that was in my hip so yea! I just have to deal with the fall out from that but thanks to my awesome Naturopath I had supplements to take immediately after I got done and my hip is doing great today!
The part that got me with all this is when my oncologist told me that I was incurable and that there was nothing she could do about it. In other words it would just basically keep growing. So you hear incurable and you think of FEAR among many other things. You have a choice of saying F@#$ Everything And Run or Face Everything And Rise. I choose the later every day! The journey is the biggest part of the adventure and it has been quite a journey and I haven't even started telling you what I have learned yet!!!
Peace and lots of love,
Leslie