Trust Your Gut

“Go home and get your affairs in order.”  Words I thought I would never hear.  What does it mean?  How is this possible and why me?  What would you do?  I cried.

Just days before I am singing:  “I got me an old car, takes me down the road, radio is playing, carry me no load, I just shake off those blues. I got on my travelin’ shoes. You better believe it!”  These are words to a song that my husband wrote for me, because my family traveled alot and in many ways.  My dad had been an over-the-road truck driver much of his life and used those skills to drive our family in our Winnebago to many of the western states of America.  Over the years, we also moved to multiple houses which I think was due mom and dad’s efforts to accommodate their expanding tribe by increasing our living space. I am pretty certain they represented some of the first house flippers.  

For the last 6-8 years, being in a band had been a fun addition to our daily lives. We work our eight-hour day jobs Monday through Friday, hold rehearsals in our basement, affectionally called the Badger Den and practice our music somewhere on available evenings and weekends.  We had just moved into our lovely home for multiple reasons including to have a larger space for the band to play and were unaware that soon we would be taking a stand in battle against the biggest giant we had ever faced in our lives. During one of these days I noticed an itching sensation on my skin and it seemed to be affecting my whole body.  I wasn’t seeing a rash, so my next thought was to do a mental inventory of any products I would have recently changed that could cause this, like shampoo, soap or laundry detergent. I even wondered about our new house.  I thought, “The water changed!?”  What if there was something in our water?  I even made a few phone calls, but nothing panned out.

We had been in our home for about five months and we weren’t entirely unpacked.  I started scheduling medical appointments to determine what was happening to my body.  During my first primary care physician consultation it was assessed that my skin was dry and that I should go home and put on lotion. I was to schedule another appointment in five days if it didn’t resolve.  This irritated me, because I didn’t think it was a very wise thing to say to a 53 year old woman that had raised three kids and been married for 32 years.  However, I listened to the doctor's advice, waited my days and returned.

At my next appointment, I heard my first unwanted and unexpected news.  My blood test results presented as diabetic.  My response to that statement was a mixture of shock and disbelief, “What?!  How can this be?”  For roughly two years, I have been following a well known exercise program and low sugar eating.  I primarily shopped from the outside aisles of the grocery story and cooked most of our meals.  The food plan focused on cooking fresh proteins and vegetables with a primary focus on elimination of white sugars and bleached grains.  I was basically eating a low glycemic diet.  I was also averaging low impact cardio exercise three times a week.  Additionally, my liver test results were also under scrutiny and this caused my primary doctor to schedule both an Ultrasound and an MRI appointment for me with local medical specialty clinics.

As you can imagine, I was angry, frustrated and not believing this was happening.  I thought that with my progression towards a lifestyle of healthy living, over a period of ten years that began with moving towards eating more organic foods would have produced different results.  A friend of mine that was a practicing vegetarian, had been slowly teaching me about eating this way and I was gradually eating less foods that are known to cause inflammation in the body.  I know I definitely was eating better than the average person in America.

Within a few days of my MRI, I was told that a tumor about the size of the tip of my pinky finger was found in the head of my pancreas.  My primary doctor also explained to me over the phone that this is something that a surgeon would remove and I was left with the impression that we could set up a surgical appointment where the tumor would be removed and I would move on with life.  If only….

Me in our new home. Just before I found out I had pancreas cancer.