Hi Shannon,
Thank you for sharing this letter on the website, it definetly made me cry. It made me cry for two reasons... one, because it is so unfortunate and unfair what you had to go through, and two, becasue it mirrors my life recently and it brought up so many emotions. I was diagnosed with stage 1b1 adenocarcinoma in March and had a trachelectomy in May. Pretty much everything you described from emotions, to what happened in the hospital, to how friends and family treat you is what I have and continue to experience.
I wanted to ask you a couple of question if you don't mind. What stage was your cancer when it was diagnosed. I also thought I had a polyp anbd turns out it was cancer. Also, I thought that HPV did cause the adencarcinoma as well, but from what you are saying it doesn't. Does that also include the high risk HPV types (18 and 16 I think)? It is scary to hear that 3 years is all it would take, and even scarier to hear 9-12 months. Do you know how big your tumor was when it was removed? I'm coming up to my first follow up appt and I am scared to death. Scared that I didn't make the right decision treatment wise (have the hysterectomy as opposed to the trach), scared that they will find another, scared that becasue of the nature of the cancer that there is some in my uterus. Even though they scrapped the uterus and had clean margins of all the tissue that was removed and all lymp nodes clean, we both know that you could still have a clean margin and a tumor "pop" up somewhere up in the uterus as they think this cancer can have multiple sites.
Any info from your experience you can share is greatly appreciated. You're right, you have cancer are the scariest 3 words you hear back to back, and I am trying to stay positive, but some days I just can't handle it and I struggle to reconcile what I went through and what I will continue to go through.
Congrats on being released and remaining cancer free! You are an inspiration at a time when one was sorely needed!