Three weeks ago if you asked me I would have told you that for the first time in my life I had everything together. I was the most organized then I had probably ever been before in my life, most of my belongings packed neatly into boxes just waiting to be sent up with me to my new destination. I was finally going to live in my own apartment in a city where I hadn't been born or grown up in. A town where I had a few friends sure but where I didn't feel like everyone knew me and every aspect of my life. I was ready for the first time to work hard and get to know people, have a real life. Of course part of my reason for moving was for school, I finally felt like I had found the right major, a field that I was passionate about and subject matter that both excited me and challenged me. For the first time everything just felt right, I was happier than I had ever been in my whole life because I really felt like my life was just about to begin. The future wasn't something I was afraid of, I was excited for it and I embraced fully. Sure at 28 I may be what many people consider a late bloomer but this didn't matter to me. What mattered to me was what was to come, all the possibilities that I had in front of me.
Unfortunately we can not control, or predict what the future holds for us and this is a story that should show this in the biggest way. As I write this I want to try and keep this from becoming too depressing because I'm not trying to be depressing at all. This is more of just a story about how your life can change in an instant and you can never really know what's to come. No matter how much we plan and make plans and put things in to action in the end we don not have full control of everything that happens in our life. So maybe the best we can do is to learn to roll with what comes.
During all the time that I was planning I was also working to save money for my upcoming move and any other expenses that could come up until I could fine a job in Orlando. I worked a lot and I am the kind of person who will work themselves into the ground if you let me so when at the time I was having weird pain I wasn't thinking that much of it. most of it seemed to be in my lower abdomen so I wrote it off as possibly ovarian cysts or something. I had never really had ovarian cysts before but from what people described that seemed about right and after awhile it became pretty easy for me to just ignore the pain and move on. I grumbled and complained a little but I didn't think they were bad enough to ask a doctor about so I moved on.
About two weeks after that I was cleaning the fitting room in my place of work and as I reached down to pick up a hanger I heard something in my back pop and suddenly I had excruciating pain in my shoulder. At first I thought it was one of those things where I would hurt for a second and it would go away but I was wrong and that night they sent me home so I could go to the emergency room. At the emergency room they took a few x-rays and told me they thought it was probably something muscular. It hurt for days but I was back to work by the end of the week, no big deal. Except the pain in my side was still there and getting worse, to be honest, at this point I didn't want to tell anyone because I thought people would think it was nothing. I ignored it for a month.
Finally I broke down and made my aunt take me to the Doctor, at the time she thought I was being a hypochondriac and all my complaints were annoying her. I got defensive and we fought, I still feel bad about the things we said that day and I know she does too. I hope she knows that in all of this I'm not mad at her, not even a little and none of this is her fault. The Doctor ran a fe blood tests and put me on some antibiotics. He seemed very concerned by my pain level but I refused to things like X-rays and ultrasounds because I didn't have insurance or the money to pay for those kinds of things. I took the antibiotics and so for a few days I felt better and left it at that. This pattern probably went on for three months, with new places of where my pain was showing up through out the whole thing but I had convinced myself that I was being a baby, it was probably nothing and in a few days I'd feel fine.
Then one night I sneezed and the whole left side of my body cramped up. The pain was unbearable, I couldn't sit up, I couldn't lie down, basically I could stand there motionless and the pain would subside a little but I knew that something was really wrong. Of course I'm no doctor but my immediate thought was maybe I had something like kidney stones or something. I didn't know but I did know that I was in pain. I tried to sleep that night but couldn't so at 4:30 in the morning I forced my dad to take my to the emergency room.
I've been to the emergency room a fair share of times in my life time and this was the first and probably only time I had seen it completely empty. I was thankful because it didn't take long for me to get back into one of the rooms. Also it was blissfully quiet which was something that I felt I needed. At first I was in too much pain to sit on the bed, they had to ask me three times to do so before I finally complied, it just hurt too much. The girl who took my blood must have been in training because while I won't get into details about it here it was bad, It was the first time I've ever felt light headed when some one took my blood and my dad said I turned green. So because of this the other nurse thankfully decided to put my IV on the other side. The pain medicine helped immediately which was really the only thing that got me through the cat scan and x-rays because they were extremely uncomfortable for me to get though.
Then there was the wait. The longer the wait was the worst I knew things were, I can't even tell you why I felt that way, I just had this pit in my stomach. There really wasn't anyone else around so why else would it take so long. I could even hear the doctors in the hall talking among themselves, not everything just bits and pieces but I again I knew it was bad. Some one asked "How old is she?" and then there was a response of "That's so young." About five minutes later they came into the room. A nurse, the P.A. who was treating me and a man I was told was the E.R. Doctor. The doctor did all the talking.
"Well we found lesions in your pelvic bones." I stared blankly mostly because the statement itself was so very vague I didn't have the slightest idea of what he meant, so I asked. "Is that serious?"
The Doctor was short with me and simply stated "Yes, it can be very serious." Stupidly I paused, before adding. "Well that's weird because most of my pain is here right now." I pointed to under my rib cage and then the Doctor reached over and jabbed me hard in the pelvic region, "You mean it doesn't hurt here?" I screamed and I swear for a second I was almost on the ceiling. I said nothing else but started to cry,
Anything said after that was a blur for awhile, they told me I needed more catscans, x-rays, and a MRI. They also told me I would be admited into the hospital for the day. Really the whole thing felt like an out of body experience.
At one point my dad left to pick up my aunt and my other aunt and cousin and ended up there too but the time frame for all that is a little hazy I was on lots of drugs for pain and they were wheeling me around the hospital for all sorts of tests and at the time I still really didn't know what was going on. I think I was in the E.R. all of 4 hours altogether and at some point we were all just waiting in my room before I was admitted. It was at that point when my cousin asked me if I had any questions. I nodded and took a deep breath. "Be completely honest with me, Do I have cancer?" She nodded and at that point everyone in the room bursted out into tears. I had already known the answer before I asked but that conformation made it all the more real and at that moment my life was changed forever. Still I was surrounded by all people who loved me and who were there for me. They were going to fight this with me and that was really the only comfort I could ask for at that moment.
