Ariella’s story, continued. You hear stories of people seeing a doctor for some symptom or another, and are immediately admitted to have port placed and start chemo. This wasn’t the case for Ariella. She went to the doctor at the end of January 2017 for symptoms and though it was pretty clear she had a tumor, official diagnosis didn’t come until near the end of February. We were going crazy, worrying about the cancer spreading while waiting for the diagnosis but they can’t just start treatment. All cancers are treated differently so we had to wait to make sure they used the correct protocol. In the meantime, prior to taking her in for her leg pain, Ariella was losing a crazy amount of weight and we couldn’t figure out why. Blood work didn’t show anything and we had scheduled an appointment with a GI doctor. However she had her MRI on the leg prior to the GI appointment and finally the weight loss was explained.
After official diagnosis things did move a bit more quickly. Ariella is a dancer and at that time she was working on a tap solo. Unfortunately she was no longer able to dance but we allowed her to perform the solo one time, at her dance studio’s showcase. The week after that her official diagnosis came and we met with the team at Sinai. We received an overwhelming amount of information and scheduled more scans and biopsies. After that Ariella decided she wanted to go to the dance studio to be with her other family.
Scans and biopsies determined the cancer had not spread and she was admitted to have her central line placed and start chemo. We were ready to fight this thing. However when the line was placed her lung was punctured requiring a chest tube. The chest tube was incredible painful and Ariella could barely move. There was excruciating pain when they were trying to unkink the chest tube at one point and ultimately they had to replace the 1st chest tube with a second larger one. We couldn’t start chemo until the lung healed and the chest tube was out and that took close to a week with Ariella in significant pain that whole time. Finally the tube came out and chemo started.