By now, you are wondering “How? Why?”. Looking back, cancer’s been in me since September 2011. I was constantly tired and not feeling myself at times. I was also starting to ache with arthritis-like pains. We took it as part of recovering from pregnancy #2. Our boy was born in June and figured it wouldn’t last too long; I would get my strength back.

However, it aggressively attacked my bones in January. I finally went to the ER in March after spending the day before Costco shopping. (Yes, folks, I was shopping–full load.) I had spent the week prior doing my usual business, running errands, kids and et al. while taking longer and longer breaks in between them and eventually, gasping for every breath I took to get through the day. It was a Tuesday morning when I called my family and asked if they can come and help me. The hospital was close by, but my Self was done. I no longer wanted to deal with it alone; I could no longer help myself.

Hindsight, my family saw something was seriously wrong. No color to my face. I would stop every few steps to catch my breath and they patiently waited for me while I packed myself for ER. My loving husband had also returned home from work that day, even though I had told him things would be fine. (I’m a lousy liar.) At the hospital, things seemed to quickly spiral down to an even more urgent need to tend to me. One nurse who saw me dubbed me, “Hemoglobin 5.” What she and all of us didn’t know, I was really hemoglobin 3.7. (To give you a better sense of where I was at, normal, healthy people run around 11-14.) I had lost alot of blood. The medical staff had a million questions for me and eventually were baffled as to: 1) How I managed to live my life at 3.7, 2) Where/how was I losing the blood and 3) What was the cause of this???

A blood transfusion got me back to my anemic level and by week’s end, a bone marrow biopsy had revealed the true cause of my illness. Stage IV, aggressive B-cell lymphoma. The suspense was over.

April existed for cancer. It became an almost daily visit to some doctor or perform some procedure prior to my chemotherapy regiment. I wanted April to go away. We hit a snag with one of the procedures, the Spinal tap. Migraine headaches are minor compared to spinal headaches. This also bumped up the chemo treatment early and before I knew it, I was headache-free, start of chemotherapy #1 and delayed port insert. I think I had an out-of-body experience by this point. It was fast lane all over again, but with cancer.