Hello this is Mallory Davenport and I just had my 31st Birthday June 18 and times always haven’t been this happy for me. I would like to brief you “why this blog has come about.” In Sept. 2011, I was diagnosed with stage ll Hodgkins Lymphoma at the age of 25. I had just gotten married that April to my best friend and soul mate. 🙂 My job as an independent insurance adjuster was going great, I was making good money and traveling the U.S. SO Getting diagnosed with cancer was like being blindsided by a truck.
I decided to do chemo in Fort Worth where I had my house at the time, since Jack and I hadn’t been married that long and we worked on the road, I hadn’t officially moved into his house…. in Daphne, Al. So I started chemo in Fort Worth, Texas in November 2011, the standard treatment for Hodgkins Lymphoma (ABVD). SO This is how my experience began: While arriving at my first chemo not knowing what in the world was going to happen to me.
The One thought that still burns in my mind from my first chemo, Is when I went into the chemo room…. and as I picked out the chair…. I would sit in for the next few hours. Something inside me yelled, “Your body is too strong for this chemo, it’s not going to work”. So I pushed that thought away and didn’t think about it again until my first PET scan, when I was told my cancer wasn’t responding like it should.
I stayed inside for months, my blood counts were always low and I wasn’t allowed to be around people, due to the risk of getting sick. I spent a lot of time in the bed with bone pain, and body aches. Some days I would go into my closet and cry out to God, “What did I do?” “Why are you doing this to me?” “Why did you let me meet my soulmate to take it away from me, and are you going to let me die?” I was also embarrassed that those words came out of my mouth, because it was me a year earlier that asked God to change my path and redirected to a more righteous path.
Those weak moments where when I would questioned God’s plan — because I didn’t understand why this path… why me, why cancer? That answer came a year or so later, when the pieces started to fall together!!!
When I went on to complete ABVD chemo in Fort Worth and they did a PET scan to see what was going on. The doctor I had in Fort Worth came in after my PET scan to tell me that my cancer had gotten more aggressive and there was nothing he could do for me, he was sending me to MD Anderson in Houston. After three rounds of in-patient ICE Chemo treatment.
Having been told I had to go to MD Anderson, my thoughts told me to move to Houston next to MD Anderson for four months while being prepped and sent through a stem cell transplant, this was in July 2012. At this time, I have an idea of natural therapies and had randomly met people that had cured Hodgkins naturally. I wasn’t convinced I could heal anything naturally and continued on with conventional treatment. In October 2012, I was able to go home…. this time….. I would go home to Alabama. This is when I started to wake from my American slumber.
While waking up from this rude awakening trying to figure out. Why in the world would I think I could be healed by poison being pumped into my body killing my immune system? Because I was told doctors are there to help you and studies have been done to prove the effects of chemo treatment are usually counter active… But it did the opposite for me, it made my cancer worse?
After the chemo didn’t respond: I had also been told that I would have to wait 2 years for stem cell to see if I was in the clear. 2 years was their magic number… two whole years is when most people relapsed. I was never really in remission, I went back over all my scans they all show activity under the left arm before stem cell and after. See chemo can not kill cancer stem cells, the stem cells protein is too hard to penetrate.
They kill every other cell making it appear like the cancer is shrinking, when actually the cancer stem cells are creating their own food supply and blood line, like a little tumor village (what I like to call it). The immune system can not see or detect these cancer cells, they are rouge and go unnoticed. During the “two years” they had time to grow and build back up their little tumor village under my left arm, it wasn’t a lot of growth but enough to make the MD Anderson team want to poke at it.
At this point I was sick of being poked, had PTSD everytime I crossed the Texas border headed for MD Anderson. They had drilled into my hip bones six times within a year for bone marrow biopsies. They don’t put you out while their drilling into your bones, your wide awake and can feel it. All my other biopsy had been taken in 15 mins intervals at the most. I was becoming a pro at this! And this last one was different, I passed out from the pain and threw up…. as this pain was excoriating. As all my cancer buddies kept asking why I had so many bone marrow biopsies.
I have never had any traces of cancer in my blood or marrow, so I wasn’t really sure why I had so many. I just did what ever the doctors wanted without questioning anything. I didn’t want to go back after that biopsy and I wouldn’t have gone back but my mom and mother in law knew that my stem cell team wanted to do another biopsy on my tumor (that was barely there), I was weak and gave in.
May 2014, This was my 3rd biopsy on this one spot, usually I was in and out and awake through the entire procedure. I liked watching the needle go in and puncture the small node, it was fascinating. Fascinating and horrible because I was like an experiment! The node was so small and so hard that the needle couldn’t penetrate it, for 30 minutes they dug around in my under arm trying to chase down a small lymph node not big enough to biopsy.
From my own vantage point …through the eye of an Alabama hurricane… this is what happens when you penetrate the thick protein of a cancer cell. When the needle is removed it leaves an open hole in the cell wall allowing the cancer to spread. Going through years of chemo and a transplant doesn’t leave much of an immune system to fight off anything. The tumor that I could feel at the time of the biopsy was the size of two quarters by June 2014. My granddad died of chemo toxicity on June 28th, thats when I kicked it into gear. I blew up on the doctors.
I knew from my granddad’s experience what had happen was wrong and he was healthy before he started chemo and radiation, he was only in his 70s. I also remember being in a room with my Mom, Aunt, and my brother, the doctors came in to explain what would happen next and that he would slowly die. I knew what was going to happen I had went through it with my granddad!!!
They had blasted him with so much radiation and chemo in such a short time it shut his body down, one organ at a time. My mother and brother had not seen this side of me before, I was always the shy little country girl. That shy girl I once was left that one day, never to return. I left that day and didn’t go back to the hospital, Granddaddy had chemo before he went into cardiac arrest, so I knew that on the third day after his chemo that the organs would shut down because thats when chemo hits the hardest.
Before I go any further some of you will get upset and think I’m anti-doctor…. blah – blah, I don’t care what other people chose to think and do. That is their choice not mine. I have friends that did well on chemo and are healthy and happy, and I’m grateful for that. I wish my body could have handle chemo and treatment that way, but not everybody’s body is created the same.
We have different individually with different blood types, some of us may have weaker immune system than others. Are bodies are all different, thats what makes “studies” “group studies” have no meaning to me. Also the “studies” only follow the patient two years at the most. There is that special number again “two years”! My clinical trail study only went 60 days post transplant, but what about the here and now? The clinical trial failed may also fail after their 60 day window!!!!
Also do you know how a PET scan works? It uses glucose to feed the active areas of cancer so they can see it on a scan, telling them where the cancer is. They know that cancers lives off sugar, if they didn’t there wouldn’t be a PET scan. Do you know that every body has cancer cells in their bodies thousands each day, our immune systems in their natural healthy state fight them off.
After all these trials and tribulations of life they had forced me through during this “two years.” I began researching and studying until I couldn’t see straight and knew the path that I wanted to take. I began realizing that every body has cancer cells in their bodies 1000x’s each day and for the most part our immune systems in their natural healthy state fight them off. Its when our bodies get bogged down by life, food, and stress that our bodies immune system… won’t preform like they should. Which gives cancer a wonderful breeding environment to grow and thrive!
At this point I started wondering why if the the immune system being so important for our survival. Why are these doctors so determined to attack and damage it with poison or radiation. Some people will tell you, they know what they are doing they are killing the cancer with the poison and radiation. So if this is true why are we killing the cancer with the body, but we haven’t even addressed what caused the cancer???
With all that said I have just written I am faced with fighting Hodgkin’s and I decided after failed conventional treatment that fighting it naturally is my best option. There is no easy cure, it takes a commitment to make a lifestyle change for a healthier mind and body. Every day is a new battle, our bodies are all different, you have to find your own balance and learn your body…. SO If we create a healthy environment and take the time to work on ourselves it creates a better body to fight off cancer and diseases.
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