Coffee with All4Cure - Julie (2/3)

When I first started noticing something was wrong, it was around the fall of 2018 when the time changed for Daylight Savings. I noticed I was so tired, and I couldn't understand why I could not get over the time change. I would come home from work and go straight to bed as early as five o'clock sometimes. Soon I started getting bad back pain. I went to a chiropractor, and it didn't seem like it was my spine. They just thought I had a herniated disc, and I never got an MRI.

Suddenly one day, the pain worsened. I couldn't pick up anything, not even my work bag. I went in for an emergency MRI, my first one ever. I remember I started crying during the MRI just because I knew something was very wrong. I went home, and three hours later, the radiologist who did my MRI said, "I can't get ahold of your doctor, but you need to go to the emergency room right now because a tumor has broken your spine, and you could become paralyzed." I had no idea my spine was broken. I drove to the mountains for work in a snowstorm earlier that same week with a heating pad on my back for the pain. Never in a million years would I have thought my spine was broken. When you're sick, it's sometimes easier to ignore the signs. Your mind is so clouded, and you're just trying to get by and think that nothing is wrong.

I went to the ER and learned my T11 vertebra was eaten 75% of the way through by a tumor. I had an emergency surgery that put a metal cage in my back held by 2 rods in 9 screws from my T9 down to my T12. The recovery from surgery was absolutely horrible. For me, it was worse than having a stem cell transplant for multiple myeloma. My husband had to wash my hair for about two months, and I couldn't get around without a walker. I was in a back brace for almost four months. My friends and family did a GoFundMe, and people from my work rallied around me. Oddly enough, I feel like some people go to the doctor, get a multiple myeloma diagnosis, and nobody in their life understands what it is. People don't realize it's an incurable blood cancer. My diagnosis came with this catastrophe, so everybody knew what awfulness I was going through. I had a large support system because of that. I wish I had been diagnosed before my spine was broken, but I would have been dead if it had not happened and forced me to get medical help. My bone marrow was 80% infected at the time of diagnosis. I didn't have much time left before my disease would have been untreatable.