Creating A Holistic Treatment Program

This article is part of the series “One Moment At A Time” about my family’s journey as we help my mother fight brain cancer. Feel free to subscribe below to receive periodic updates about our journey in your email inbox. Thank you for your continued support during this challenging life moment.

MEETINGS AND MORE MEETINGS

The week before Christmas, my mother, Abby, Mike and I all sat in the oversized doctor’s room listening to the medical oncologist describe the chemo treatment that my mother would begin taking the following week – the day after Christmas. It had already proven to be a stressful day since my mother began to have very strong abdominal pain in the car on the way to Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is about an hour drive from my mother’s home.

We knew she hadn’t had a bowel movement in quite some time but it was hard to understand if it was something else causing the discomfort. It could be ulcers from the medication but we had no way of knowing for sure. As the medical oncologist walked us through my mother’s treatment plan, I asked some probing questions to better understand what we were about administer to my mother. While the conversation was very interesting, it took much longer than any of us had patience for knowing that my mother sat with some discomfort. We considered taking her to the emergency room at Parkview if she continued having pains.

After the medical oncologist walked us through the actual treatment details, a nurse proceeded to explain the potential side effects of the medication. And then another doctor came in to discuss how we should treat the potential side effects. I remember sitting in the room listening for over an hour as my head began to hurt. My eyelids wanted to close over my exhausted eyeballs.

And finally, we were introduced to a team of “nurse navigators”, a team specialized to help families navigate through the entire treatment program.  Basically we could ask any question to the navigators and they would figure out how to help us.  We had now entered hour two of the appointment in the same room and we had reached information overload. I can barely remember the last ten minutes of the appointment because my mind was complete mush. Luckily, my mom’s abdominal pains subsided towards the end of the meeting which helped calm us down after such a long meeting.

It was apparent that whatever concern or need we had about my mom’s treatment program that the team at Parkview Medical Center would be able to help us. However, the tricky part of this help was that you had to ask. And I thought to myself that sometimes we may not know what to ask. For example, the only reason I knew that we could meet with a registered dietician for my mother was because they asked what she had been eating leading up to our visit that may have caused discomfort. And then the nurse navigators mentioned they had a registered dietician on their team that we could speak with since I indicated we wanted to provide healthier meals for my mother. But I wouldn’t have known that if my mother wasn’t having abdominal pain.

DIVING IN

While the Parkview care team has a plethora of programs and options to help patients and their families through a cancer diagnosis, the programs aren’t always widely known unless you ask. Even though the meeting was excruciatingly long, it led me to dive into researching more about cancer and treatment.

Did you know that we all have cancer?  I don’t want to alarm people, but technically, every single person has cancer cells. Our bodies are made up of more than 50 trillion cells that constantly divide to keep us healthy and growing.  And sometimes, one of those cells mutates or becomes cancerous. For most people, your body will locate the mutant cancer cell and get rid of it. And what we do to our bodies (over time) can limit our bodies response to killing the mutant cells, allowing them to divide and spread.

My mother’s cancer diagnosis has fueled my absolute need to figure out how to help her survive.  Podcasts, books, articles, Facebook groups, probing questions with my mother’s doctors and care teams, etc. I have quickly learned some incredible things about something I knew very little about. (I’ll talk about cancer prevention in a future article that will help your body continue to kill those mutant cells.)  And this process has led me to creating a holistic treatment program for my mother: Medicinal, Nutritional, Exercise, and Spiritual.

Over the next series of articles, I will walk through the pieces of our treatment program to give you a glimpse of what we go through on a daily basis to get my mother better and also help other families going through something similar. It has become apparent that diet and exercise are equally as important, if not even more important, to her survival as her medicinal treatments are – chemo and radiation in my mother’s case. In fact, some cancer patients with the same type of cancer as my mother have survived much longer because they ate specific “superfoods” each day.  More to come about this.

One moment at a time.

I plan to continue to write about this new life journey. It is a tough topic to write about but I feel writing will be a great emotional release for me and could help others along the way going through something similar. If you would like to receive a weekly update, feel free to enter your email and sign up below.