How did I get here from there?

It's a good question, and one everyone wants, or at least seems to want, to know the answer to. "Did you just find a lump?" "What happened?" "I'm shocked, how could this be?" All valid questions I've been asked when I explain that I have cancer.

I guess if I had to pick a time it all started I would say right before Christmas this past year. I had hired a new nanny who seemed to bring every damn germ in the valley into our house. We got flu after flu after flu, and then some more flu. Everyone was sick, not just us, it was the whole community. Everyone had some sort of bug and was coughing, hacking and/or vomiting. It was also a stressful time for me. I had a lot of holiday business and new family traditions to make, since my Dad is no longer with us. I got sick too. I just never seemed to get better.

Finally in January I went to the Instacare. Sure, not your best bet, but I just thought I had a cold that wouldn't go away and needed some antibiotics. The doctor there said I had pneumonia, gave me an inhaler, some seemingly way overpriced antibiotics and sent me home. To give him credit, he did take a chest x-ray to confirm his diagnosis and said I had a "little" fluid on my lung that should go away when the pneumonia subsides, but that I might want to get it checked in a few months.

I went in again right before Valentine's Day, I'm a florist, my life revolves around holidays—Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Christmas. Must not have been a long enough dose of antibiotics. More antibiotics, more inhalers. I actually worked through Valentine's Day with pneumonia. I was short staffed, having had a blow up with Nate, but thanks to my family, who stepped in to help, we did okay. But I can't say I was "getting rest..."

Again a few weeks later I was back at the doctor’s. Must be "atypical pneumonia" he declared while handing out some different antibiotics and more inhalers. I kept getting better to a point, but then it would always get bad again. Hard to breathe, coughing. Have to give the doctor a break here because the flu in our community was just like this. It would be bad, go away and then return with a vengeance. Everyone said "watch out it comes back..." so it was easy to see that with me too. And honestly I probably did have the flu and pneumonia—just a whole lot more underlying it.

Finally in mid-March I could barely breathe at all. I gasped for air even walking just a few steps. I loaded my son in the car and we went to the Instacare again. This time they quickly put me on oxygen and shut me in a room. I saw a different doctor this time. One I had actually seen every now and then for the last 10 years or so. I usually ended up seeing him when I would have a minor sinus infection or a hair fracture on my foot. He knows me fairly well. After he complained about my being in Instacare—instead of with my family physician, whom I couldn't see for another week, and a few other random bitchy complains about his clinic in general—he settled down to business and read my history beginning with the first of the year. He didn't buy the pneumonia diagnosis and decided to dig deeper.

He brought in everything he could think of: EKG, x-rays, oxygen, nebulizer breathing treatments. I started to feel better. I had oxygen in my blood; the breathing treatment had opened up my lungs and I was breathing somewhat deeper. Then he brought in the x-ray result.

There was a large accumulation of fluid on my left lung. So much so it looked like more than half my lung was constricted by it. He handed me a paper for something called "pleural effusion" with a doctor’s name, "Abdulla," and the words "tap it". This was a punch in the gut for me. My father had the same problem shortly before he passed and was seeing the same Dr. Abdulla... and I remember them "tapping it." The appointment coordinator was to set an appointment ASAP for me to have this done. Unfortunately, ASAP meant 2 weeks, I was miserable.

I have to express great appreciation to Dr. Frank Brown here. While I always found him quaintly quirky and sort of goofy—in that big dog, small cage sort of way—his relentlessness and refusal to "just send you home with more antibiotics" lead me to what is now saving my life. I will have to go back and thank him in person; if only to watch him blush and stare at the floor.