How it all began:
We went to the beach as a family on March 6th, 2005. Everyone got sick while we were there, Warren the least. He was a little tired and had a small cough. (The next week was when the cancer started, but of course, we didn't know it then.) Warren was more tired every day, until finally, he would lie on the couch all day. I just thought it was the flu. Funny thing, though- he had no fever with it. During this time, his tooth was also hurting, and his regular dentist referred him to a root canal specialist, because something seemed to be happening that deep, but he wasn't sure if it was big enough to do anything about. So we thought maybe it was the tooth infection holding him down. Then for about three days, he complained of pain in his right arm, which was better after a hot shower. Then his arm was feeling better, but his cough was worse, and I could hear him wheeze when he got up to use the bathroom, yell at his brothers ( it's like he had to get his adrenaline up to be able to have enough energy to get up, and of course he was cranky too), and then lie down again. Friday night, April 9th, he vomited dark blood, so I took him to emergency at Portland Adventist (8 pm). They thought the bleeding was from him taking ibuprofen for a week. They said he had pneumonia in one lung and also a lot of fluid around the outside of the lung, which sometimes could be a sign of a tumor, etc. I didn't take the tumor part seriously, because the doctor was being such a jerk to me ( ever since he heard that we didn't do immunizations), so I wrote him off as just trying to shock me, like when he said he'd have to put a scope up Warren and down his throat to see where he was bleeding from, and to prepare myself. Also, he said that Warren's kidneys were almost all the way shut down (10% function), so they would have to transfer us to Emanuel, where there was a Pediatric specialist ( thank God!). We had to go in the ambulance so they could start hydration right away (5:30 am). Emmanuel never did anything about the bleeding ( it fixed itself), they were worried about bigger things, but they didn't tell us that yet. They put us into a regular room for observation and put him on antibiotics for the infection. The next day, his kidneys took a turn for the worse, and they put him into the ICU. On Monday, they told us they were looking for a tumor or something, and they found it, growing through the diaphram from the liver, pressing on the lung and causing the pneumonia. Then they found more tumors, through his kidneys and even into the center of his heart. Tuesday they went through his belly button and got a biopsy of the tumor, and sid it looked like it was a lymphoma, and Wednesday they knew which one: Burkitt's lymphoma (pre- B lymphocyte, small, non-cleaved cell), an extremely aggressive type of cancer that typically kills in 4 weeks. Warren had had it for 3 weeks, and it was stage 4.( I'm so glad we didn't bring him to the regular doctor, who would have put us on antibiotics and sent us home for another week.) They told us to expect 6 months of treatment, then changed it to 1 year, when they saw how far it had spread. So I went from "okay, 6 months, we'll be done before baby's born, I can handle this", to "I'll have to bring the baby to the hospital for a few months?" Then I stopped thinking of myself when I heard them say, " We have to start chemo tomorrow (chemo- think "poison"-is a big deal for any mom to think of giving to her child, but coming from a natural medicine standpoint, where I hardly ever gave the kids Tylenol, and avoided antibiotics, it was a huge deal), we already put in the Hickman line, the dialysis line, and a line to drain the fluid off the lung (it kept building up quickly)." They had to start with smaller chemo than recommended, because of his non-functioning kidneys. So they did a methotrexate LP and bone marrow biopsy on Wednesday, and started steroids to shrink the tumors, but not too quickly, or the dead tumor material would overwhelm his kidneys (it grows quickly, but also dies quickly). Dialysis continued for a few days, and, with our whole church and everyone they knew praying, his kidneys improved faster than they expected, and they started real chemo a week later, very aggressive chemo. He was in the hospital for a month with extremely bad mouth sores and side effects, which were so painful they hooked him up to a pain pump, and he could push the button when he needed more. He hardly ate at all, and when he finally went home, it was attached to a bag of TPN (IV nutrition). We were scheduled to start chemo again a week later, but his counts took a while to come up, like all the times he had the aggressive chemo.The maintenance rounds were a piece of cake in comparison. He finished chemo in December (he had less infections and set-backs than they expected),and his one-month-after-chemo scans were clear. So now we wait and watch. And live life. And thank God for extending his life.
