> From: Jess Bradley <jbradl@sprynet.com>
> To: vianet@i-2000.com
> Cc: Dharmendra Sant ; jbradl@sprynet.com <mango@globalserve.net>
> Subject: My Mom Had it
> Date: Saturday, May 17, 1997 2:02 PM
>
> I'm 18 years old. During my junior year of highschool, Sept. 19th 1994,
> my mom was diagnosed with LeiomyoSarcoma. She was 43 years old, 4'11"
> and she had a tumor the size of a volleyball in her abdomen. They
> doctors said the only way they could have found it otherwise was if they
> had done an appendectomy some years earlier.
>
> The way they did find it was just by chance, my mom was going to leave
> for a business trip in Canada.. and had been burping a lot the week
> before, so she went to the doctor... they took a X-ray of her belly, and
> they saw that her liver looked funny and that something might be wrong
> with her adrenal gland. When she came back from Calgary, they did a CAT
> scan, and found the tumor, a week later, they diagnosed it as cancer.
>
> I wasn't really suprised that is was malignant, neither was anyone else.
> My mom's mom died of Uteran Cancer, her father from Intestanal Cancer
> and one of her older sisters had been diagnosed with Breast Cancer the
> year before.
>
> They started Chemo immediately. The tumor was too large to radiate and
> it involved too many systems to surgically removed. They tumor had
> grown fingers and was wrapped around all sorts of things inside her.
>
> After the first two chemo sessions, the tumor began dieing off at a
> rapid rate, but it was dieing off so fast, that it had no where to go,
> and the tumor abcessed. Thanksgiving morning, 1994 she went into
> emergency surgery to try to clean out the infection. They weren't able
> to remove any of the tumor, and she spent 2 weeks in the hospital
> recovering.
>
> They tried two more chemo sessions after that, but both were completely
> ineffective, and the doctors said they could do no more. We flew her to
> the City of Hope Hospital in California, but their doctors confirmed
> what had been said earlier.
>
> My mom died several months later, June 11, 1995, 9 months after her
> diagnosis. It was the hardest experience I've ever had, and I'm still
> dealing with the reprocussions.
>
> Three weeks ago, another of my mom's sisters was diagnosed with Inflamed
> Breast Cancer, it has spread to her lymphnodes. On Wednesday she had a
> malignant, golf-ball size tumor removed from her brain. I'm terrified.
> Out of the 7 people in my mom's immediate family, 5 have been diagnosed
> with cancer, and 3 of them have died. I'm confused, extremely numb and
> scared as hell.
>
> I'm going to look for some support groups out here, I'm not living at
> home anymore... I'm just searching for some other people who've gone
> through stuff like this... To see how they dealt with it... To know that
> I'm not alone... 'cause right now... I'm the only one I know.
>
> jbradl@sprynet.com or mango@globalserve.net