Past Coming into the Present and Future

 Here's a background of everything that has happening this past year.

I graduated high school June 2012 and went down to Brunswick, Georgia for my first year of college at the College of Coastal Georgia. One night, my friends and I were having a fun night in the town and celebrating the fact that Christmas was almost here. We were out at Target when it happened. As I walked out, a deep pain struck me like something I had never felt before. At first, I thought it was just a huge stomach at first. Instinctively I called my mom, seeing if she knew what could be done, even though she was over 1000 miles away helping my other sister and my 1-1/2 niece. My mom asked me the normal questions of if I had gone to the bathroom, what had I eaten, etc. As I was talking to her, I screamed out in pain a few times, a scream my mom has never heard before, and knowing me and that I have a high pain tolerance, she knew something was wrong. She had my roommate, Hannah, take me to the ER. Upon arrival, my blood pressure was 72/39. I was pale, in pain, kind of wobbly, and very close to passing out. After lab work and a CT Scan, it was determined that there were lesions in my liver pressing against an artery, and had ruptured, causing me to lose 4-1/2 liters of blood (the body only holds 7 liters) and my hemoglobin was 4.8 (normal is between 12-16). I was rushed to an operating room all while my mom is trying to figure what is going on. She talks to the doctor quickly; all the while my sister is on the phone with the airlines getting my mom a flight down to Georgia the next day. My surgeon told me after my surgery that he stitched me up and that if I had thought about going back to the dorms and trying to sleep it off, within 2 hours, I would have been dead. Praise God that I had the intuition to call my mom or any of this wouldn’t have happened! A few days later, the results came back diagnosing me with Hepatic Neoplasm Suggestive of Transitional Liver Cell Tumor/ Carcinoma, or in other words, liver cancer.

Afterwards, I traveled up to Michigan, my home state, and went to the University of Michigan Hospital for treatment. I had an MRI to see what exactly was inside me and how big it was. My pray was that when he looked at the MRI, my tumor would have just vanished. Unfortunately, the tumor was still there. Early February I was scheduled for transplant surgery. My surgeon thought he was going to have to make small incisions, open my previous incision, and halfway down that incision open me up diagonally towards my liver, looking like a hockey stick. Me, being from Michigan, Ann Arbor area specially, and being a huge Detroit Red Wings fan, was perfectly fine with that incision. A few days before surgery, my mom asked me if I knew what kind of music my surgeon listened to while operating. Me, being the one being operated on, freaked out. This man, who should have all his attention on me, listens to music? That freaked me out! Although, it does help them focus. The morning of my surgery, before I was wheeled into the operating room, he came to see how I was doing. Out of curiosity, I asked him what kind of music he listened to. He replied that he listened to everything and proceeded to ask what kind of music I liked the most. I answered, ‘Country music is my favorite of all.’ He said nodded and walked away. I thought nothing of it. After being wheeled into the operating room, as everything was being prepped and the meds were being pumped into me to slowly knock me out, I hear in the background music, specifically country music and look up to see my doctor smiling. While they were knocking me out, level by level, I was listening to music, and the music that I knew and loved.

When my surgeon finished, he came to my parents and told them, ‘she was so skinny, I didn’t have to open her up anymore.’ All he did was extend my previous incision, no small incisions, no hockey stick. When my parents saw me, I had the dopiest, happiest smile on my face. My mom asked me why I was smiling, I replied, ‘He played country music’ and continued to smile. The report came back that my surgeon took out my tumor, the size of a softball!, along with my gallbladder; that was just in the way. The softball size tumor he took out, along with some tissue around it to keep it clean turned out to be 2/3 of my liver, about the most you can take from ones liver. What I had forgotten from biology class was that the liver regenerates, and as I learned with my MRI, not only does it regenerate, but if you take the left side of the liver and leave the right side, the right side moves over to the left, and the new part of the liver grows where the right side had been! Fascinating!!!

As far as I was concerned, I was healed! My next checkup, 3 months later, showed that there were tumors that had come back. It showed that there were a few, roughly 5 at the most, on the right side and middle of my liver. To take care of this, I had 2 TACE (Transartieral Chemo Embolization). The procedure consisted of me being awake; thankfully I was allowed to listen to music, and I also fell asleep during the procedure. A radiologist was going to go in through my femoral artery, up to my liver, and shoot chemotherapy beads towards the tumors. I had an angiogram during one procedure and it showed more tumors than we had thought. We didn’t know which to believe. MRI’s aren’t as touchy and don’t pick up as much, but angiograms are very touchy and pick up a lot, sometimes more than expected. We were hoping for the less tumors, obviously. This past Friday, I had another MRI to see how the TACE procedures worked. The procedure didn’t work as planned, not working even 50%! The MRI showed that in my liver I have at least 20+ tumors, and then also, since my tumor originally exploded outward of my liver into my abdomen, I have 2-3 other tumors in my abdomen near my kidneys and liver in the right side.