Towards the end of last April right when Covid was blossoming across Oklahoma, our oldest daughter, Alison was complaining of numbing pains in her lower extremities. She was 38, had her career going great guns, was very actuve in her church and has lots of friends. Life was good. But the pain in her lower back got worse and worse. She finally went to the emergency room late one night in late April. By herself of course, since covid stuff was already in full swing. They did a CT scan and saw a mass on her sacrum, which is the bone that connects your spine to and holds your pelvis together. All of the nerves to your lower body also pass through the sacrum. The tumor they found wasn’t very big but involved the entire sacrum. The ER Doc immediately sent her by ambulance to OU Medical Center in Okie City where she immediately saw a neurosurgeon and they checked her in the hospital there. Again, all of this all alone. She’s 38 but is a Momma’s girl for sure. She’s never even been sick much less had this kind of pain before. She hears she has a tumor, is carted off 120 miles in an ambulance, and now is talking to a surgeon who’s telling her surgery is not only necessary but is necessary NOW. MRI, surgery, post op, and then after the pathology, discussions with an oncologist. All by herself. I’ve gone through a bit of my own trauma like this lately and I can tell you as a (damn near) 67 year old big ole boy it scared the living bejeebers out of me and that;s with Julie by my side. The only contact we had was via her iphone to our phones. They brought her back to Tulsa in an ambulance and she had a short stay in the hospital here to recover from the surgery. This whole time, the only thing she has with her are the clothes she wore to the ER. We took her some things down to Ok City but had to camp out in the parking lot. The good news from all this? Many scans showed no other signs of the disease anywhere. the
Turns out she had a cancer that will be familiar to all of us, a sarcoma. Which is what our Co9 had and I know it was in his lower back as well. Her specific type is call ‘Ewing’s Sarcoma’ and is what killed a good human and basketball player named Wayman Tisdale here in Tulsa years ago. Once we got her home, and me and a bunch of guys from her church moved her to our house in like one day, we found that finding an oncologist during covid was not going to be easy. We researched and found a specialist at Siteman Cancer Center in St Louis who wrote her treatment plan and got her a slot at Cancer Treatment Centers of America to do the actual infusions and track her daily and manage her plan. A round of chemo is three weeks. Her cycles were five straight days of almost all day infusions, then going back at 11:00 that night for a shot of some kind that prevented the chemo from killing her. Then two weeks to recover. then the next cycle was one day of some super bad shit followed by three weeks to recover. She did that 17 times. In the middle of it, our youngest daughter came to stay a month and help. Alison caught Covid in June and we all had to mask up and be extra careful inside our own house. We sealed off the upstairs and made it through the entire ordeal without any of the rest of us three catching it. That set her back a month of treatment. Then we took her to St Louis for 8 weeks where she got daily proton radiation treatments at Siteman. We drove an hour each way into downtown St Louis from Julie’s Mom’s house in Moscow Mills, Mo. Julie and I alternated two weeks at a time because one of us had to stay home and tend the home fires. There were many scary trips to the ER over the course of the last year. A couple of times we thought she’d had a heart attack which was one of the dangers they told us of her treatment. All false alarms though. And all as our country went through some bullshit and we all went through this pandemic.
Writing this has been kind of cathartic. I’m only telling you now because in about an hour she will go for her very last chemo treatment. She actually had some peach fuzz grow back on her head this cycle, but it’d be gone by Friday. But for the last damn time.
I don’t know what kind of PTSD or whatever you want to call it, that we’ll all have when all is said and done. Its been stressful as you can imagine. But its also been positive. We’re closer as a family, the six of us, than we have ever been. And we’ve all seen the sibling that we thought was the weakest in many ways show courage and grit and character that have us all sitting in admiration. The most positive of all is there’s no cancer.
And today is her last day of a almost sixteen month very tough row to hoe. Excuse me if I shed a tear. Bennj a long fucking year.
BKB
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Originally Posted by Gunther
