My name is Andrea Taylor. I'm 31 years old now and I've gone through
cancer twice. I'm a two-time cancer survivor. I've gone through the low
points and the up points. I've gone from health to sickness to health back
to sickness and health again, and I'm ready to tell you some things about
me and how I survived this struggle.
How I Found Out About My Cancer
I live in St. Joseph, Missouri, a very small town outside of Kansas
City. I was a school teacher for close to seven years when, being a single
woman, I was enjoying life, things were going well. And one day, I was
getting ready to go on a vacation. Everything was fine and I kind of had a
little sore throat, so I went in to see the doctor to make sure I didn't
need to have antibiotics in the sunshine, which isn't a good thing. And he
told me, "Andrea, that's not a sore throat, that's a swollen lymph node."
With that lymph node being swollen, he said "It's probably nothing, but
let's check. It could be a lot of things."
So, we went through some different kinds of tests. He ended up
biopsy-ing the lymph node and found out that it wasn't a sore throat, it
wasn't something to just kind of laugh and think an antibiotic could take
over, but it was cancer.
My World Changed
I was 27 years old and my world had changed. I found out that I had
Hodgkin's disease and that my world would no longer be as I'd expected it.
I went to a whole bunch of different doctors who all confirmed that, yes,
there was no mistake, that they had found out that I was in Stage 1A of
Hodgkin's disease, which is really a very early stage of Hodgkin's, but
still, the word "cancer" kept coming out of everybody's mouth.
Cancer is a pretty bad word when you're looking at the community around
you and having to explain to everybody, including gentlemen friends that
seemed to be important to me at that time in my life, that, hey, guess
what? Not only am I dealing with some other stuff in my life, but I also
have cancer. Do you want to hang around for that?
My Treatment Experience
I went through four and a half rounds of radiation in which they had to
have you go into a very small room behind six inches of iron, and you
crawl into a room and you strip down naked and climb onto a completely
cold, cold table and talk to someone only through speakers, microphones,
and closed circuit TV. You lie down and they start giving you X-rays. And
even though it never hurt, it was really, the best way I could explain it,
some very intense X- rays in very specific spots for no more than a minute
at a time. It was so dangerous for everybody else that they had to talk to
you this way. It was kind of very scary and lonesome.
My family, my mother and my father, since I'm an only child, of course
felt completely helpless. Mom and Dad were saying, "Hey, do you want me to
go with you to radiation? Can I drive you? Can I help you?" And quite
frankly, there was nothing that they could do to help me. It wasn't going
to do me any good to have them drive to a doctor's office and sit in the
waiting room while I ran off and did my things and then came back and
said, "Okay, let's go now." They couldn't go with me, they couldn't do my
treatment for me, so basically, my job and my relationship with them was
to continue by letting them know my feelings.
Now I'm a person who has always been extremely involved in the
community and in the areas of education. It was certainly an incredible
part of my life and I did not want it to change. Three more surgeries,
they told me at first, when they had to do the staging, that perhaps I'd
want to take six and a half weeks off of school because they were going to
do some pretty intrusive surgeries where they had to biopsy all the organs
in my body and stuff like that, and that I'd probably want to take some
time off. Well, I'm a person that likes to keep going with my own life. I
like to keep things status quo. So instead of taking six weeks off, I took
basically a week and a half and went back to school.
So my daily routine would be to get up, go teach school, spend my day
working with my first and second graders and doing everything I could to
help their world stay normal, leave school, go get my radiation, basically
schedule an hour to deal with the aftermath of radiation, sometimes
sickness, sometimes fatigue, sometimes just plain doldrums of wanting to
feel sorry for myself. And then I would get up the next morning and
continue.
About three and a half weeks into it, I started losing my hair, which
was such an incredibly traumatic time for me. Once again, I'm single here,
but, I just felt pretty good about myself, and now I'm also losing my
hair. Cancer for the first time was no longer something just inside of me,
something that no one from the outside could detect unless I told them.
But it was now detectable from the outside world. They could look at the
back of my head and realize that there was something wrong with that lady.
What was wrong with her hair? So I continued and went through yet two more
rounds of radiation for a total of three rounds of radiation, and during
that time frame, some changes happened. I couldn't swallow quite as well,
I always had a dry throat. I seemed to probably be moody, I think.
Kids Understand
People around me had to deal with the fact that maybe some of my
emotions were like walking on eggshells. But I tried very much to keep
that to myself. But at times, I just actually had to sit down and say,
hey, Miss Taylor is kind of tired today. Does anybody know why Miss Taylor
has been sick lately? And I had to have that conversation with my students
because I was getting so tired, and to explain to them what cancer was. We
are fortunate enough in our district to have Internet access, and we were
able to access several Web sites dealing with cancer, and I was able to
tell them and explain to them in a very small terminology that Miss Taylor
was sick. Miss Taylor had some genes inside her that were trying to eat
the rest of her body, but the doctors were fixing it and we'd all get
through this. It's amazing what kids can think of and what kids can remind
and reassure you on a daily basis, in dealing with the questions that any
of their parents had on how it might affect their students.
Time went by and the end of my radiation had come to a great
celebration. We all celebrated and sang Christmas carols, because we had
gotten done right before Christmas. One year had gone by and my life was
starting to get back on track. I went back to teaching school. My hair
grew back and my energy came back. My appetite came back. Everything was
just pretty perfect. I was dating a different man who seemed to understand
what I was going through. In fact, he was a doctor whom I had met during
my treatment who worked in another department.
Life Throws a Curveball
I've now finished some more degrees in college. I've gotten my master's
degree and my specialist degree in education and I'm just now applying for
my doctoral candidacy. The University of Missouri was going to accept nine
students to get into the doctoral program. I fill out my application, I go
through my interviews, and the day after I find out that yes, I had been
accepted into the doctoral program, one of nine in the state. I go in for
just a routine check-up and we find a lump on my back.
At that time, they thought, oh, it's probably nothing, there are some
side effects to radiation that sometimes cause clumping of some of your
different materials, basically cellulite that causes little bumps that
they will break down and no problem. But they wanted to check it out just
to make sure, make sure there were no problems. Once again, I scheduled
another surgery. Now I know my surgeon by his first name, and asked him to
give me one more signature with his knife. So, he takes it out and calls
me and says, "Andrea, we seem to have a problem." What started off to be
an in and out, one day outpatient surgery on March 17th was no longer just
a small thing. They had excised a tumor, and the tumor looked aggressive
and fibrous in nature and they didn't quite know what it was. They
couldn't understand, because it wasn't Hodgkin's disease, but it was
something else.
Recurrance and New Cancer Found
They sent if off and got several different hospitals to confirm that
no, it was not Hodgkin's disease again, and no, it was not leukemia, which
is what Hodgkin's sometimes comes back as. But yet somehow, through my
treatment, using the radiation, they had formed a hot spot, and this hot
spot was now a new form of cancer, a sarcoma. And this sarcoma was going
to have to be treated very aggressively, very quickly, and in a whole
different manner than the first time.
I at this point no longer had the options of radiation. And the
surgeries that we had done to protect my ability to still have children,
since I had never had children before, would probably all go to waste,
because the chemotherapy that I was going to have to go through was going
to be extremely high dose and I would no longer be able to have children.
So once again, now at the age of 30, my world had been rocked and my world
was over, in my eyes. I couldn't believe I was going through this again.
After a pretty good family regrouping and realizing that you really
don't have time to waste over wondering why this happened to me, and I
don't have time to figure out what went wrong or to doubt doctors, but I
needed to just move forward and work on surviving again.
The one good thing that I found quickly was that, you know, when you
have already gone through cancer one time, the terminology and the way you
talk to your doctors and the understanding of what you might be going
through is stuff that you no longer have to take 
time to learn. It was kind of secondhand
nature. The vocabulary, terminology and the tests and the things they were
looking for.
I Found The Right Specialist
So I went off to another hospital in another state where they had
actually seen this sarcoma before, which had been so rare that not many
had ever seen it. I packed up my things, went down for what I thought was
just going to be a check-up and a consultation, and ended up staying there
for two and a half months. When I left my house and left my dog and my cat
and my family behind, the person that I was dating, I never realized that
I wouldn't be back for two and a half months.
But we made some decisions while we were there and realized that we
just needed to start moving. So, I started my treatments. I went into
chemotherapy. I was far away from home and this time I didn't have the
luxuries of keeping my pretty routine life. My day was getting up, going
into the hospital, checking myself in and spending a week and a half
getting intravenous chemotherapy, dealing with daily blood tests, daily
intrusive wake-ups in the middle of the night, and really not getting much
sleep.
My Chemo Experience
The first round of chemo was extremely hard for me. They were trying to
keep me from getting sick, from feeling pain, from dealing with everything
and the stress that, quite frankly, I just didn't handle it well. I got
sick and I didn't feel good, and I didn't like this. And I just knew at
that point there's no way I was going to make it for six months of this
type of treatment. But I got through the week and a half and my blood
counts went down and came back up and I spent a lot of time on the
telephone talking to people back home. And everyone rallied and sent me
gifts and sent me flowers and called me on a daily basis, so that when it
came time after the twenty-one days between chemotherapy treatments, when
it came time for me to come back, somehow I felt I still had enough
strength to try it again. I still wasn't promising anyone I'd make it
through six treatments. I didn't think I needed that many. But I would at
least give it one more try. I went through another round of chemo and this
time it was a little more successful. So I didn't get sick and I didn't
feel pain and I didn't seem so disoriented. And I spent seven days in the
hospital. But I found that every morning, even though I was going through
chemo, I could get up, I took my shower, I got dressed, and I kind of
conned the nurses a bit, and we put my I-V treatments on a roll-around I-V
drip bag. I got dressed, I looked as normal as I possibly could and I
would go walking down the street around the hospital with my rolling I-V
just making sure I was back in time to get my new bag. I found getting out
really seemed to help me a lot. They had told me that, yes, you would
lose your hair. And I didn't quite believe them, but I knew from the first
time in radiation that it was a pretty traumatic situation. So when they
told me that I would be losing my hair, and that I should be preparing for
the fact that it would be coming out soon, my family and I went to a
nearby wig shop between chemo treatments, between two and three, and we
tried on a whole bunch of wigs. I decided, should I have long hair, should
I have brown hair, should I have blonde hair, should I have red hair? But
we chose a wig that was very similar to the haircut and the color my hair
was before I was going to lose it.
We bought a wig, we went to lunch, and then we went to the beauty shop,
where I asked them to shave my head. I didn't want to wait for my hair to
fall out, I didn't want to fall victim to cancer. I wanted to be in
charge. So Andrea, who was a person who normally had lots of hair, just
went in and we shaved it off! Needless to say, the beautician in the
beauty shop thought I was crazy. But we all knew the story was behind it.
By the time it came for my third round of chemotherapy, I was bald, by
my choice. I went into the hospital understanding the seven days and how
the first four days I would be pretty okay, but about the fifth day I just
was tired and I was exhausted. And the fifth, sixth and seventh day of
chemotherapy, we all knew that I just needed some time to sleep, and some
time to watch TV and not really think much or talk to many people.
This continued for the next six and a half months of my life. The six
and a half months were very hard, were very emotionally up and down, but I
knew that I had the security of my family. My mother was able to come with
me to every single chemotherapy treatment. We decided that between breaks,
you know, I didn't have to go back and work anymore. So between my fourth
and fifth chemotherapy treatment and between my fifth and sixth
chemotherapy treatment, we went on down to Florida and we sat by the beach
and we enjoyed some just quiet time without having to worry about what was
going on in St. Joseph, Missouri.
I was really worried about running into my friends and what they might
think about me. And I knew that I probably didn't quite look as healthy as
I seemed to be handling the treatments, that regardless of the fact that
the treatments made me look a little sickly, and they may not understand
that. It was a shock for me to realize that when I lost my hair I was also
going to lose my eyebrows and my eyelashes. So I learned how to use makeup
to draw them on and to make myself look as normal as possible. My goal was
to not be able to be identified as the victim, but maybe somebody,
somewhere, might think I was a caregiver walking around that hospital when
I didn't have my I-V bags running around. So, at the end of six and a
half months of treatment, I walked into the office of my doctor who said,
"I think we're done. I don't think we're going to need to see this
anymore. And right now, I want you to think of your life this way. It's
behind you, we're in the business of curing people. We're not in the
business of letting people die." And that's when I realized what the whole
point of the entire six or seven years of my life had been.
The Point Is To Survive
All along, they had said to me, "Andrea, the point is to survive.
You're gonna survive. We're gonna get through this, we're gonna have
another day, and you're gonna survive this." All my friends said that, my
mother said that, and anybody that I seemed to run across said, "You're
gonna survive. You're gonna survive. You need to believe it." The point
had been to survive. And now that I had survived, the new point in my life
was to live my life. The cancer was behind me and my life was in front of
me.
I Have a Wonderful Life
So today, I found myself back in St. Joseph, Missouri and the job in
which I had left as a schoolteacher. I had applied for some administrative
positions. And even though I had had all this behind me, they still did
not consider me to be any less of a person. I had been accepted to become
the language arts coordinator for the school district. I'm now training
teachers in the same school district that I used to teach and my life is
very successful. The doctoral program, since I did score real high in my
entrance exams, and I did do well, I contacted the doctoral program and
had to tell them the reason why I was dropping out, and they guaranteed me
a position, and so I will start my doctoral program this summer. I'll be
done in two years. I'm involved in community organizations. I spend
daily time with my family. And although I didn't marry the person that I
started off dating when all this began, and although we're not together
any longer, I know that I'm here for a long-term relationship and that
someday I will be able to get married. And that I will be able to adopt
children. I may not be able to have them myself, but I do know that
there's a million children in the world that need someone like me to tell
them that the world's not so bad to deal with and that they can get
through it too.
Lessons I want to Share
Looking back at what I had to go through, I know that I had two pretty
big experiences with cancer. Both times they were world shaking for me.
The first time I had the belief that I would get through it with no
problems. And the second time we hoped that I could get through the
treatment to survive. I would want to tell some people that had just
perhaps found out about cancer, there's a couple of things to always
remember: Number one, you're still a person. You never lose who you are
simply because you have cancer. Everything you believe in and everything
you've always known is still the same. You just have a little, shall I
say, inconvenience for awhile. It was inconvenient to go through treatment
and it was inconvenient to get sick, but it's a pretty small inconvenience
when you find out that that will cure you of the problem you have. Try
to keep your life as normal as possible. Know that great changes and
giving up or rescheduling your life isn't going to help you deal with the
stresses you're already dealing with. Realize that you have people to take
care of you, people who you can talk to, and it's okay to be mad. People
kept saying, "Boy, you have such a great attitude." But you know, I could
also tell them, you know, I had great moments in my house where I was mad,
where I screamed and I yelled and I cried and I cursed and I knew that I
had two or three very close friends that I could share that angry side of
me with, and that they didn't think that my life was to a point where I
wasn't handling it any longer.
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