Queah:

I had been going to cancer counseling and around the time of my second round of chemo I got married.

Donna:

Buckle your seat belt it’s about to get bumpy.

Queah:

My cancer counselor told me a story about another woman she was counseling who was in a marriage and as soon as she was diagnosed her husband left her. I was thinking that I was so lucky because here I was going through chemo and my boyfriend wanted to marry me. I thought I was so lucky.

Donna:

All I’m going to say is this… I told her she should wait to get married.

Queah:

While we were dating the relationship was really good, but a month after we got married he turned into a person I didn’t recognize. He was abusive and it was very stressful. He wasn’t actually abusive while we were dating, but after we got married he was making demands.  I felt he was very selfish.

Donna:

Actually, I thought he was abusive in the very beginning.  Not physically but very much emotionally and sometimes his actions toward her were displayed right in front of me.  I tried to warn her but she would not listen to me.

Queah:

I’m divorced now.  It was a bad situation,  and at the time I had to deal with him and go through ten more rounds of chemo.

Donna:

Yeah, and that was tough for me to observe.  Not to mention one night while I was at work my phone was ringing off the hook and I couldn’t answer.  A co-worker picked it up and on the other end was my daughter screaming at the top of her lungs for help.  Apparently there was a big blow up between the two of them and police were called.  I was so afraid for her and here I am miles away.  Then there was the time he locked her out of their apartment with all of her belonging and most importantly, medications inside.  The locks had been changed and the apartment complex wouldn’t give her a key.  It was a big mess.  I went down there, got a locksmith to get us inside when he was gone, hired a moving company, loaded up her stuff and got her out of there.  I think the mental abuse was his way of controlling her – but it didn’t work.   Trust me, she’s a tough girl – I could never control her either.

The marriage lasted six months but I’ll let her tell the rest.

Queah:

I kept a diary throughout the majority of my chemo, while I was going to counseling and while my husband and I were arguing. He and I started going to counseling together, and that helped a little bit because I was able to express what I was feeling. The counseling was a good thing, and I think that not enough people believe in counseling but it’s a really healthy thing to do. It helped me put some things back together, and it helped me realize I’m not by myself. There are other people who have the same experiences, emotions and fears. It was tough but I survived it all.  I look back now and I don’t know how – I was just so focused.  I wanted to live so that I could leave him – I wanted to live so that I could have a family – I wanted to live and go back to my great job.  I just wanted to live to have a future and be happy and have all those dreams I had when I was a child.

Donna:

I too wanted that for her.

Queah:

I felt if I gave up I would never get to that point. I didn’t think I ended up with cancer so that I could die at that point in my life. There’s so much more that I needed to do, that I had to do, and cancer was just one of those things that happen to people.  But boy was this hard.  I was on so many different medications and was having so many side effects from all of them.  Sometimes I believed the drugs, not the cancer, would kill me.  It didn’t matter what they gave me because every single drug would have all of the brutal side effects.   I was okay until round nine of chemo.

Donna:

Is your seat belt still on? This is where she wanted to just give up.  I had been trying to make trips to Houston for just about every round of chemo.  They were all about two weeks apart.  Her chemo drips would last all day.  Then they’d send her home with a portable pump that pushed chemotherapy through her veins for another 48 hours. She was thin, weak, her skin was dark and ashen.  She never felt good.  Well maybe she felt okay right after her drip because they gave her steroids that gave her a boost of energy and an appetite and boy did we take advantage of that.   But on one trip to Houston – I got there ready to take her to treatment and she said she was not going.  She emphatically said no more cancer drugs – she was done.  All I could think was if she didn’t finish the 12 rounds of chemotherapy the cancer would kill her.  I spent at least a couple of hours  trying to convince her to just hang in there a little longer.

Queah:

Once I hit my 9th round I wanted to give up;  I wanted to stop it because I was so sick. I couldn’t move.  I would get up and throw up, go back to bed, go to the kitchen and get a little bit to eat and then throw it up. If I could get up and lie down on the couch I would fall asleep 30 minutes later.  I don’t know if the doctors thought I was making it up or not, but they were telling me that they didn’t understand why I was so sick. That made me so depressed. I developed neuropathy from one of the cancer drugs.  It got so bad that my hands hurt and were numb at the same time. I couldn’t wear gloves and I couldn’t grip anything – the numbness would also work its way up from my feet to my knees, and I was miserable. I just kept thinking there’s got to be something wrong with me because other people can do this. On top of that I was having reactions to the nausea medicine they put me on. I was having violent muscle spasms and I had to go to the emergency room. While I was in the hospital the nurse gave me an extra dose of Ativan and told me to relax when in fact I was really having an allergic reaction, but we didn’t know it.

One night I was home and I couldn’t control my neck, head, or arms – imagine having body parts you can’t control! My husband tried to massage me and he gave me doses of Ativan. I wanted to go to the hospital, but he said, “No, just take a hot bath.” I said, “If you don’t take me to the hospital I’ll take myself,” so he finally got up and took me.  When I arrived at the emergency room, a nurse at the counter was trying to get me to fill out the paperwork, but another nurse in the back heard me and saw how I looked physically. She said, “You might be having an allergic reaction. What medication are you on? What are you taking?” I listed the drugs and somehow remembered the nausea medication, and she said that she thought that was it.  She immediately took me to the back and gave me two high doses of Benadryl and within 10 minutes the symptoms stopped.  She said the only reason she knew to do that is because she had the same reaction to that drug.  I got lucky this time because this nurse knew from experience. That’s just an example of the issues that I was dealing with. It seemed like everything that was happening –  the things, the drug reactions that only happen to a small percentage of people  –  happened to me.   It sucked but I did get through it.

Donna:

We discovered she could no longer take anti-nausea drugs Reglan and Phernergan after that experience because one of them caused the reaction and at that point we weren’t about to try to narrow it down.  Queah went through so much during this first bought with cancer.  One would think that would have been enough.

Queah:

The beginning of my last round of chemo was August 15, 2005. I had a PET scan shortly after that and it was clean and I had another one in May and it was still clean – so I’m officially in remission!

Donna:

It’s about time – finally some good news.

Queah:

I’m still at the doctor every single week, seriously, but I don’t mind. I go every Friday to the cancer clinic and they do blood work to make sure that my blood counts are good. The cancer center has this distinctive smell, and I associate it with cancer; I still get weak to my stomach when I go in for the blood work. On Fridays my oncologist is there and even though I don’t have an appointment I get to see him and consult with him if I’m having any issues.   I still get some of the same injections I had while on chemo for energy.  My blood counts are still really low and I still have to take the nausea medicine. It’s the weirdest thing, the doctor says the chemo is over so I shouldn’t be so nauseous.  I don’t know why I still am.

Donna:

Yeah, and she still has that neuropathy as a result of the cancer drug Oxaliplatin.  I know, small price to pay for a drug that has the ability to save your life.  Combined with all the other cancer drugs her body is not the same anymore but she’s gaining weight and beginning to look like herself again.  And thank goodness she’s no longer in that crazy marriage.  We are looking toward the future – searching for our happy ending.

Queah:

There are a lot of good things that came out of my whole cancer experience, but one good thing is that you can write off your medication on your taxes! That’s like $1000!

Donna:

I can’t believe after all that – this is how my daughter sums up her story.  A tax write off.  Really Queah?  Please tell me you didn’t spend that money on shoes.