Please share with us your journey from the time
you were diagnosed with cancer to the time that you
became cancer-free.
Well, what happened was, it’s crazy because when I was
diagnosed with cancer, I was in my last two weeks of
nursing school. I remember going to the doctor before I was
diagnosed; I just knew something was off. I remember going
to the doctor and telling the doctor that I just don’t feel right,
I feel that something’s wrong, I feel like I’m hyperventilating
all the time, I can feel my heart racing, and I feel weak. And
I noticed that I ate some food, I had food poisoning, well, me
and my kids did, but it seemed like it took longer for me to
get better than they did. They were sick for a couple of days,
but me, it took two weeks for me to get over that stomach
bug, so I went to the doctor, and he told me, oh, it’s just school
stress, you’re anxious, and it’s just stress from nursing school.
And I’m like okay. But a week later, I was feeling worse, and
my wrists were hurting, and I couldn’t even bend my hand,
and my joints and my feet were swelling up. So, I went and
got a second opinion, and I told him, something doesn’t feel
right, my doctor told me it was nothing, but he didn’t even do
lab work, he didn’t do anything, he just listened to me talk.
And then, this doctor did all the things that my doctor should
have done; he ran the lab tests, he did all the diagnostic tests
that my doctor who I’d been seeing for years, didn’t do. And
he sent me home. And it wasn’t even two hours after leaving
that he called me and said, Tanieka, we have your results, and
you need to go to the ER like right now. And so, when I went
to the ER, they did a bone marrow biopsy, they never gave me
blood though even though he kept saying that I was anaemic
and that they needed to give me blood, but they didn’t give
me blood, they did the bone marrow biopsy, and that was a
Friday. And I stayed in the hospital all day Friday, the whole
weekend until the next Tuesday morning. And that Tuesday
morning, that’s when they came in and said, all your results
are back, and it shows that you have leukaemia. And the kind
of leukaemia that I had it was very aggressive, it moves fast;
it attacks and breaks down your body fast, and it can kill
you really fast. I had to rush to another hospital for chemo
that same night. They did tell me that if I had let this go for
another two weeks, I would have been dead. So, we started
chemo that same night. And thank God, that was April 19 th ,
when my chemo started and I spent that whole summer,
basically from April 19 th , my last round of chemo was August
I spent that whole summer in hospital. The first time I was
in the hospital for five weeks before I was able to go home, I
stayed home a week, and then I went back for another month.
So, it was just like back and forth, getting chemo. But in all
DOZ Magazine | March 2020
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