The basics with a side of Cancer.
Here is where my life starts. I was brought into this ever so changing world by Greg and Emily Hinson on October 1st, 1993. It was a pretty normal birth; messy, exciting, and beautiful. I appeared to be a completely healthy 8 pound 9 ounce baby girl. My parents took me home after the usual time in the hospital and started living life with their newborn baby girl. When I was 7 months old my family took my older sister and I to have pictures made at the fire station. While we waited for other families to finish their sessions we were being typical kids and wanted "this" and "that" from mom. Well mom being the mother she is was multitasking to please us both and sat me in a chair to grab some candy out of her purse. As she leaned over to grab some candies I fell out of the chair and onto the floor, hitting my head. We rushed to the hospital to make sure that it was just the usual clumsy fall every toddler takes or if it was more. The scans showed no sign of contusion or any serious life threatening issues so we went about our way and continued life. Over the next couple of weeks mom couldn't shake those crazy good motherly instincts she had and noticed I was digressing in sitting up and crawling. I then stopped moving my legs altogether. She then took me back to the doctors to request more scans to be taken. All the scans the doctors were doing were only of my head and nothing lower. That was the issue. My life was slowly being numbered and no one even knew it. My mom knew that there had to be an explanation other than "she's in shock" as to why I kept digressing and stopped being the daughter she knew I was before the fall. Finally, mother's persistent attitude paid off when they did a full body MRI and found the mass wrapped around my spine. I can only imagine being 19 years old (the age of my mother) and hearing the words "your 7 month old baby girl has Nueroblastoma (type of cancer) and the mass is the size of a grape fruit...we need to operate immediately". The next three years consisted of surgeries after surgeries, numerous rounds of chemo, scans after scans, and a lot of tears. Within those three years I had relapsed (cancer came back) in a different spot and it consisted of two smaller tumors in my rib cage. Luckily with skilled surgeons and a couple exploratory surgeries all of my cancer was gone.
I am proud to announce that I have been Cancer free for 20 years now. Although I live with some side effects of having all those intense surgeries as a baby I am fairly healthy and live a full and happy life. |
Childhood doctor who I had since day 1 of my cancer. Very inspirational man and Dr. G will always be dear to my heart.
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