Later on that afternoon I called the person in charge of the clinical trial at Huntsman and asked what our next step was now that we had the officlal word from the biopsy. She setup an appointment to meet with her the next day to sign some papers and start the ball rolling toward treatment. While it was upsetting to officially hear that I have stage 4 cancer, it is nice to finally know what we are dealing with so we can start fighting this.

DH stayed home to work on his presentation that was to take place in the early afternoon. I don't carry my cell phone with me when I am at home and at one point I picked it up and looked at it and noticed that I had missed a call from Dr. Rhode. I'm not sure why she called my cell phone because on Friday she had contacted me on my home phone several times. She left a message on my cell phone informing me that the results from the liver biopsy were consistent with a metastatic tumor caused by ovarian cancer. I now have the official diagnosis of Stage 4 Ovarian Cancer.

When I first heard that this is what I might have I did a little bit of looking on the internet and then decided that that wasn't a good thing to do. Stage 4 Ovarian Cancer is not curable. Once it has left the abdominal cavity through the blood stream, it can be anywhere in my body and impossible to totally cure. The doctors are very optimistic about my recovery because I am young and healthy, but it is something that will have to be constantly monitored for the rest of my life. The doctors at Huntsman said that people with the BRCA-1 mutation gene typically respond better to chemotherapy than those without the mutation so that works in my favor, but it is also most likely the reason that I have this disease at such a young age. They are confident that the chemotherapy will quickly shrink the tumors that I have and that there is a very good chance of a successful surgery to remove the tumors once I am finished with my third cycle of chemo treatment. We are looking at around the first two weeks of December for my surgery, provided everything goes well up to that point. After my third chemo cycle I will have a CT scan of my abdomen to make sure that things look good for surgery and then we will proceed from there.

This has all been hard to come to grips with. Aside from the occasional pain I get on my left side, I feel completely healthy! I've tried my whole life to refrain from things that I don't think are good for my body. All of my kids were born with natural, drug-free births and the last 5 were born at home! I rarely take medicine for anything. It seems so wrong that I have these tumors growing inside of me and if I don't do anything about them they will kill me! I have so much to live for and such young kids! I keep thinking that this is all some bad dream that I need to wake up from. It's shocking how much the course of my life has changed in just a month!