Between January and April of 2013 I lost a significant amount of weight. At first I thought it was pretty cool — Yeah, Me! — and then, it wasn't so cool because I was constantly nauseous. Which affected the quantity and types of food I could actually eat. Then, when I DID eat, it exited the other end, to put it politely, very quickly.
I had dropped close to 100 lbs., I didn't know why and, I remember thinking at one point, that I hoped i would lose so much weight I would just slip between the cracks in the floorboard and disappear.
One day, in mid June, my boss, a woman, said to me as I was leaving for the day, "I'm not saying this to be hurtful, but you look emaciated..."
When I got home I called my dad and, trying to not sound panicked, I told him that I had not been feeling well for awhile and that I had lost quite a bit of weight and could he please come get me? Now the distance between my dad's house and mine is, on a good day, a little less than 2 hours and on this day he would hit rush hour traffic the entire way, so he said he would come to get me first thing in the morning. A few minutes later my cellphone rang, it was my dad. He said he and my step-mom were coming to get me that night.
My step-mom called me when they pulled into the apartment complex so I was standing in front of my open sliding glass door as my dad backed his truck into a parking space facing away from me. My step-mom was out of the truck first, her door was closest to me, and when she saw me she climbed over my porch railing to get to me. She and I stepped into my apartment and then I went to the building entrance to let my dad in. The look on his face...I think he would have started crying if I wasn't standing in front of him. We stepped back into my apartment and he put his arms around me and said, "Annie, why didn't you call me...." The two of them helped me get some stuff together and the plan was to take me to a hospital near where they live that specializes in GI (gastrointestinal) disorders, because that's what we thought the issue was.
We were part only partially correct — yet we wouldn't know that for several months.
On the way back to their house they had to make several stops so I could use a bathroom. By the time we were in the general vicinity of the hospital and their house I was so exhausted all I wanted to do was lay down so we decided to go home, get some rest and go to the hospital in the morning.
The first test the doctor ordered at the hospital the next morning was a CT scan of my abdomen which revealed an ovarian mass. The second test the doctor ordered was a transvaginal ultrasound.
The three of us were hanging out waiting for test results — I was laying down on the bed feeling horrible and helping them with word games on their iPhone — in one of the emergency department rooms when the door opened and several people stepped into the room. The emergency department physician sat down on the stool and said, "It looks like ovarian cancer so we're going to direct-admit you to a hospital across town that specializes in this." I pulled the sheet up over my head and started to cry.
My dad and step-mom drove me across town to the other hospital where I was quickly admitted to a private room on the cancer wing. It was almost 7:00 pm when I was finally settled in and my parents left for home. It had been a long day. My. Head. Was. Spinning.
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