Nothing Is 100 Percent: My Fight Against Brain Cancer
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About this ebook
I'm currently in my sixteenth year of teaching elementary school and plan on doing so for a long time. I attend Chicago's Cancer Survivor's Walk and Celebration every spring so I always remember how many of us have survived this difficult battle.
I hate hearing about others who have been diagnosed with cancer. I wish I could just reach into the television and tell them all that I have been through and learned. That it is possible to beat this fight even when the doctors tell us otherwise. So this is my way of reaching out to you and your loved ones. This book is filled with everything I didthe traditional therapies as well as all of the alternative therapies I used.
This is an inspirational story about my fight against cancer. A story filled with hope, perseverance, and miracles.
Courtney Metrich
At the age of twenty-one, Courtney was getting ready for student teaching and looking forward to soon graduating college, but life decided to take her in a completely different direction.
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Nothing Is 100 Percent - Courtney Metrich
The symptoms
I slowly woke up in the hospital bed with an extremely tight, white turban wrapped around my head from the brain surgery I had just had. My mom was sitting next to my bed. There was a knock at the door and in came my friend Annette with her mom Barb carrying a bunch of daisies to help bring my spirits up. Daisies were one of my favorite flowers at that time. They were so bright and happy, and that’s what I needed to feel at that time. We were all waiting for the doctor to come in and give us the results of the surgery. Was the brain tumor they just removed malignant or benign? This was an answer we had been waiting to hear for an extremely long week.
It was May of 1996. I was twenty-one years old, attending college at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. I was at such a good point in my life. I was living in a big, old, brick house in Whitewater with eight other wonderful friends I had met during my college career. I was dating someone who I just loved, I thought he might be that special one
and I was also getting ready for my student teaching. Finally, I was jumping into the real world of teaching. I was so very excited. Everything I had been working for seemed to be falling into place. It was a wonderful point in my life, so it seemed. But, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
One morning I woke up with an incredible headache that had now lasted for two extremely long weeks. The college medical center was treating me for what they thought were migraine headaches. So I would wake up every morning feeling nauseous with a pounding headache and throw some drugs down my throat to stop the pain. The funny thing is, this seemed to help at first, but after a few days the pain continued to get worse. It got so bad I remember lying in bed trying to figure out how I could kill myself to stop the pain. I remember thinking maybe I could just step in front of a moving vehicle. That wouldn’t take too much effort since I didn’t have much to give. I eventually went back to the clinic and they gave me a shot of Demerol, which did wonders. For that night every bit of pain I had was completely gone. After having a headache and feeling like vomiting for two weeks this feeling was wonderful, but this time they told me if the pain came back to go to the hospital. And that is exactly what we did.
When I woke up the next morning I was in excruciating pain. This was the worst it had been. I tried to get myself out of bed for almost two hours. I knew my roommate, Amy was downstairs and could take me to the hospital, but I couldn’t yell for her. I could barely talk because it hurt my head so much and I couldn’t stand up because I felt like I was going to throw up all over the place. Finally I got myself to stand and slowly walked downstairs where my roommate was lying in bed. I asked her to take me to the hospital. She jumped up without a word and drove me to the Fort Atkinson Hospital about seven miles away. I thank God everyday for my good friends because they were there to help me over and over again throughout my fight, no questions asked, no hesitations. Once we got to the hospital, of course, the nurses were looking at me like I was some college kid just hung over from the night before, treating me as if I was no real emergency. On a scale of one to ten how high would you rate your pain, ten being the worst?
The nurse asked me so many times I wanted to strangle her. I started answering with ten and ten and ten and finally said 100 as angrily as I could, which wasn’t much at this point, I could hardly open my eyes from the pain let alone answer the same question over and over again. And Amy filled out all of my medical forms. So they gave me some more Demerol and threw me into the CAT scan machine and that’s when we found out the horrible news.
Discovery
I was lying on the stretcher in the emergency room when the doctor woke me up. He was kneeling down on my left side to be face to face with me, and Amy was standing on the right side of me. The doctor said, Okay Courtney, you’re going to need your friends and family right now to help and support you. You have a brain tumor.
At this point I was so drugged up that what he said really didn’t register with me. I said, Okay,
in kind of a soft, weak voice, looked over at Amy and asked, Why are you crying?
I’m not sure what her answer was, I don’t remember much after that.
The next thing I do remember is, I woke up in my own bed back at the house from my roommates shaking me and saying, Wake up Courtney, you have to take this medicine. We crushed these pills for you and made a shake so you can drink them through this.
At that point I wasn’t able to swallow pills. I always got the liquid form of medication when I was sick. My roommates continued to say, We called your parents, and they’re on their way down.
My parents were living four hours north of me at that time in Lake Tomahawk, WI.
I slowly sat up and started to look around my room feeling a little unsure of what was happening. I mean, I knew what was happening. I was just still processing all of it. I turned my head to