My Mom's Battle/Recurrance - 10-10-2019 08:37 PM
I don't even know where to start but I will try to make this as brief as possible...
My mom was 15 years cancer free (she is 71)...well not exactly. She has had many, many squamous cell skin cancers come up all over her body over the years and about 3 years ago when they were stretching her throat to help with her swallowing issues they biopsied some strange bacteria looking stuff in her throat that turned out to be verrucous carcinoma in her throat. Her doctor told us that it was too extensive to surgically remove so he opted to do a scraping every six months to control it. He told us to think of it as like she has failing kidneys and needs dialysis. So every 6 months she went in for a scraping out patient surgery and he removed the surface of the verrucous carcinoma. At the time of throat stretching my mom finally gave in to having a feeding tube put in as she could no longer swallow properly and she was very malnourished. She was also experiencing all the sporadic high and low blood pressure issues of baroreceptor failure from the radiation damage. Needless to say my poor mother has been through so much...
April 2019 - my mom was rushed to the ER because of what she called a tumor on her tongue that would not stop bleeding. She was taking baby aspirin and her blood pressure was sky rocketed and she kept applying gauze to the wound that would not stop bleeding. They finally got the bleeding under control and looked into her mouth and did not see anything of concern. Well we all thought and knew something was just not right (her breath was foul and she was very low on energy) but kind of just figured we would wait until her scheduled appointment in July for her routine scraping...Well the day came for her appointment and before they put her under my sister told the doctor to take a look and he was like "what the hell is that, that is cancer" she had a huge tumor in her throat. He basically put her under did the scraping and removed most of the tumor that he could and basically told her to get her affairs in order but that he may present her case to the tumor board to see if there are any other options. We demanded he present her case to the tumor board who after a few weeks finally got back to us and said that she is a candidate for more radiation and chemo since it has been 10 years since her first series. We immediately began making appointments, oncologist, radiologist, pain management and for a PET scan. (this whole process took several months in the meantime the cancer is growing rapidly in her throat). Her PET scan was clear no mets so it was a go to start chemo and radiation which began on September 16th.
Well she was not a good candidate for the chemo and ended up almost dead on September 29th as her sodium level was down to 102...she was rushed into ICU where she stayed for 6 days until they could bring her levels up. They agreed to stop the chemo as her poor body cannot tolerate it but she went back to her radiation treatments on 10/7. She is officially half way done with her radiation treatments and the tumor is showing signs of drastically shrinking and her radiologist is still optimistic. So anyways, I just wanted to put her story out there as I relied heavily upon OCF when my mom was first diagnosed and went through treatment. I'm certain there is nobody out there that has had the same experience but I wanted to share her story with everybody. Thanks for listening
~Danielle
My mom was 15 years cancer free (she is 71)...well not exactly. She has had many, many squamous cell skin cancers come up all over her body over the years and about 3 years ago when they were stretching her throat to help with her swallowing issues they biopsied some strange bacteria looking stuff in her throat that turned out to be verrucous carcinoma in her throat. Her doctor told us that it was too extensive to surgically remove so he opted to do a scraping every six months to control it. He told us to think of it as like she has failing kidneys and needs dialysis. So every 6 months she went in for a scraping out patient surgery and he removed the surface of the verrucous carcinoma. At the time of throat stretching my mom finally gave in to having a feeding tube put in as she could no longer swallow properly and she was very malnourished. She was also experiencing all the sporadic high and low blood pressure issues of baroreceptor failure from the radiation damage. Needless to say my poor mother has been through so much...
April 2019 - my mom was rushed to the ER because of what she called a tumor on her tongue that would not stop bleeding. She was taking baby aspirin and her blood pressure was sky rocketed and she kept applying gauze to the wound that would not stop bleeding. They finally got the bleeding under control and looked into her mouth and did not see anything of concern. Well we all thought and knew something was just not right (her breath was foul and she was very low on energy) but kind of just figured we would wait until her scheduled appointment in July for her routine scraping...Well the day came for her appointment and before they put her under my sister told the doctor to take a look and he was like "what the hell is that, that is cancer" she had a huge tumor in her throat. He basically put her under did the scraping and removed most of the tumor that he could and basically told her to get her affairs in order but that he may present her case to the tumor board to see if there are any other options. We demanded he present her case to the tumor board who after a few weeks finally got back to us and said that she is a candidate for more radiation and chemo since it has been 10 years since her first series. We immediately began making appointments, oncologist, radiologist, pain management and for a PET scan. (this whole process took several months in the meantime the cancer is growing rapidly in her throat). Her PET scan was clear no mets so it was a go to start chemo and radiation which began on September 16th.
Well she was not a good candidate for the chemo and ended up almost dead on September 29th as her sodium level was down to 102...she was rushed into ICU where she stayed for 6 days until they could bring her levels up. They agreed to stop the chemo as her poor body cannot tolerate it but she went back to her radiation treatments on 10/7. She is officially half way done with her radiation treatments and the tumor is showing signs of drastically shrinking and her radiologist is still optimistic. So anyways, I just wanted to put her story out there as I relied heavily upon OCF when my mom was first diagnosed and went through treatment. I'm certain there is nobody out there that has had the same experience but I wanted to share her story with everybody. Thanks for listening
~Danielle