Chapter Six – Surfing for a Cure

    The world wide web. It has become the great OZ of our Emerald Planet. Is there anything that you can't find through Google? Yes, you can find all sorts of answers to all sorts of questions. But you have to have discernment when it comes to what is truth and what is just someone's opinion or an outright lie.

    I don't believe everything someone tells me and I certainly don't believe it any more when it makes its way onto a blog or a website.

    Do you know how many results show up when you Google 'cancer cures'? As of this writing it is over 600,000 results. Six hundred thousand! How are you supposed to sift through all those to find the hidden pearl of wisdom? You can't. Just because a website shows up on the first page of a search doesn't mean that it is the right one.

    I have this conspiracy theory mindset going on about certain subjects on the web. I know that you can pay people to get your website to the top of a search list and I know that 'the powers that be' have everything to lose if people start looking for alternative answers to their diseases. There is a lot of money to be made from everyone but the patient when it comes to curing disease. Because of this you have to use your own intuition and discernment and you HAVE to do a lot of research.

    My challenge was that I didn't even know what I was looking for. Yes, I was looking for a cure but a cure from what? What is cancer? What caused it to come my way? It was then that I figured that what I would start looking for was the answer to my first question. What is cancer? After all, how can you cure something when you don't really know what it is or what causes it. Good idea, Kim.

    So that's where I began. I started Googling 'what is cancer?' I then used my logic to purposefully not look at any websites that were linked or sponsored by large non-profits or commercial associations that stood to make money if a cure for cancer was never found. I know this doesn't make sense to everyone, but being an entrepreneur I always knew that to find out where a problem is in any business you have to follow the money. If a business was struggling where was the money going? If a deal was cut that was not a win-win for all parties concerned (including the general population) then you had to follow the money. Where was all the money when it came to finding a cure for cancer? Who stood to benefit from a disease that went on for infinity?

    My search was on.

Chapter Five – Trying to Strike a Deal

    I am a fairly good negotiator. Well, I am when it comes to getting things for other people. For myself; not so much.

I did feel that after my diagnosis that I should have been able to negotiate a timeline for my treatment. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to try my negotiation skills. I was always faced with "We need to do this within the next two weeks." Why two weeks? Why not a month? How fast was this cancer growing? Didn't it take me years to get where I am right now? Doctors don't negotiate. I guess they don't have to.

    I began to wonder if doctors try to schedule surgeries based on their own availability. If my surgeon were leaving tomorrow for a trip around the world for two months would she have given me two and a half months to get the surgery performed or would she have referred me to another doctor?

    I needed at least six months to do everything I could to find out answers to my questions, get things in order and live what was left of a possibly normal life. Would they consider giving me six months? No? Why the rush?

    Maybe some people faced with a diagnosis such as this pull out their insurance card and jump right up on the operating table. Since my insurance was limited, I wasn't going to be one of them. I didn't have the insurance and I didn't have all my questions answered.

    This may be what saved my life or at least allowed me to make my own decisions.

Chapter One – The Now You See It, Now You Don’t Lump)

The lump came and went several times after that. It became such a regular occurrence I decided to ignore it all together. It didn't seem to grow any so why worry about it? I had heard from other women that if it moved around and wasn't painful that it was probably just a cyst brought on by stress and caffeine. The qualifications of stress and caffeine made me a prime target for these cysts so I went about my daily routine. After all, who isn't stressed? Most everyone I knew couldn't make it through the day with at least some form of caffeine. At least I didn't add sugar and cream to mine.

I thought about going for a mammogram just to make sure that I had no cause for concern, but those things hurt and weren't covered by the kind of insurance I could get as a self employed business owner. I recalled the last mammogram I had two years prior was not only painful but reminded me of a modern form of torture. Surely we have come farther along in technology not to have to squeeze painfully stretched body parts between two plates of cold metal while holding our breaths and allowing a machine using radioactive material to take a fuzzy picture. So for right now I ignored the 'now you see it now you don't lump' until January. In January, shortly after all of the holiday decorations had been put up and I began working on achieving my carefully thought out goals for the year I remembered that it was this time the year prior that I had thought of adding 'regular self breast exams' to my resolutions for that year. I had not done it this year either. I reached for the spot where the lump had been a year ago and felt it again. This time it was no longer the size of a small pimple. It had grown. The lump was about the size of a pea. Should I be concerned? Probably not. It would probably be gone by the end of the week. I'll just cut back on the caffeine. That should do it.

I forgot about the lump until a week later when I felt for the lump again and it was still there. Okay, maybe I had cheated a bit on the coffee. I'll give it another week and see what happens. Besides, I didn't have time to make time for an appointment…or was that true? I could make time to call and make an appointment. I just didn't have time to go to the appointment. Especially since it seems that you never get in at your designated appointment time and I don't like sitting out in a waiting room filled with sick people. I'll make the appointment and then cancel when the lump goes away.

I called up a doctor friend of mine who I knew would get me in as quickly as possible. Meria had always been one of my favorite doctors. She didn't even look like a doctor. She was pretty, petite and really loved what she did. I felt that going to a female doctor would give me a one up on this lump thing. She'd probably seen it a hundred times and knew exactly what caused it and how to get rid of it for good. I knew that Meria would see me and tell me something like, "It's nothing to be concerned about. Women get these all the time, especially busy women. Drink more water and cut back on your coffee. That should do it." I made my appointment for the next week and looked forward to being able to cancel it when the time came and the lump once again disappeared.

The week passed. The lump remained and I made my way to my appointment with Meria. After filling out the necessary paperwork and flipping through a couple of magazines I was called in. I hadn't seen Meria in a while so we made small talk about the weather, her practice and everything else besides my lump until she asked me to show it to her. I watched her face as she felt the lump with her fingers on both sides moving it slightly from left to right and up and down. In what seemed like less than a minute we were finished with the exam. Meria said, "It's probably nothing to be concerned about, but I would like for you to have a mammogram just to be on the safe side. Let's get you scheduled for one as quickly as possible so that you can put this behind you." I agreed to the mammogram and scheduled it for January 31st in Southlake, a nearby town.