Miracle Survivors: Beating the Odds of Incurable Cancer by Tami Boehmer

Author:Tami Boehmer
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Filling my Cup

Heidi Bright

Cincinnati, OH

Age 53

Diagnosed in July 2009 with stage IV, highly undifferentiated endometrial sarcoma

Cancer was a part of my life at a young age. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1971 when I was eleven years old. She went in and out of treatment and remission, had multiple surgeries, and died when I had just turned twenty-three.

Her situation was hardly discussed. I don’t remember a lot of what happened, yet I remember my dad took over a lot of the cooking. My mother was a very important person to me when I was growing up, and what she said was important. She was not very talkative, so when she told me something, it made an impact on me.

She lived in Berlin during World War II and walked all the way to Heidelberg with her twin sister. They starved one winter. So she was pretty traumatized, and I think that might have influenced her getting cancer.

Although it wasn’t the wartime variety, I experienced some stress of my own. I got married in 1989, and we soon started having conflicts. I had two miscarriages early in our marriage and needed fertility treatments to have my first son because I had been unable to get and stay pregnant.

During 2009, my overall stress was worsening. While I was homeschooling my fifth-grader, I also was freelance writing, trying to make enough money to keep my oldest in a private school for gifted children. I would get gigs where I’d end up making $8 to $10 an hour, and I put in a lot of hours. I was always worried about where the next job would come from. I also was trying to eat a paleo (caveman) diet, which involves a lot of prep time.

In March of that year, I noticed I had intermittent bleeding. I was in perimenopause and had a history of endometriosis, so this was not unusual, but I still went to the doctor. She ordered an ultrasound because she noticed there was a mass in my abdomen. The results came back indicating it was a benign fibroid. I understood fibroids tended to disappear after menopause, so I started doing Tai Chi exercises specifically for fibroids and took certain supplements that were supposed to help with it.

But the mass kept growing and growing and growing and, by the end of June, it was getting enormous. We went on vacation in Colorado, and it got so painful that I spent the entire time sitting in the car or hotel, or getting in the hotel bathtub or pool just so I could get some relief from gravity. I called my doctor’s office while we were there and told them my symptoms, but was just told the doctor was on vacation. Three weeks later, I finally got a call back. The front office did not understand that my symptoms could be cancerous.

I decided to go to a gynecologist. At this point, I was ready to have a hysterectomy, but because I was a new patient, the gynecologist’s office had a three-week waiting period.

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