Since we learned about Aspartame, we went through the house and threw out anything that said “sugar-free”. We also had to toss out a couple of items like Alka-seltzer and the gum even though “sugar-free” wasn't on the package. They still contained Aspartame.
It has been about a year or so since our Aspartame crisis and we continue to be very careful of the items we buy. My father and I are doing well and feel like new people, so to speak.
Yet, my tale doesn't end there. In April of 1999, when I was seventeen, my mother died of ovarian cancer. This may not sound so unusual as many woman die of this disease every year. I don't know the particulars of their cases but I do know my mother's and here is the clincher: She didn't have ovaries.
In 1982, the year after I was born, the youngest of six kids, my mother underwent a total hysterectomy. She was forty-one.
In January of 1999, my mother had emergency gall bladder surgery and while she was under the anesthesia, numerous tumors were found throughout her abdomen. We learned she “supposedly” had ovarian cancer. I say “supposedly” because I knew about her total hysterectomy and did not see how ovarian cancer could be possible without ovaries.
I spoke with one of my sisters about this and she told me that sometimes the doctor will leave parts of the ovaries behind to help regulate hormones. With this new information, the questions I had ceased for a time as it would make sense for my mother to have ovarian cancer if this were the case. However, my mind continued to be unsettled.
A new question arose and I wondered if it was what my sister had said. Did my mother have any remaining ovary fragments?
It wasn't until February my mother was scheduled for cancer surgery at Crouse Irving Memorial Hospital in Syracuse, NY, some sixty to sixty-five miles south of where we lived in Watertown. The trip was familiar to my mother and those who traveled with her, save for myself. They had all made this trip once in 1981 when my mother was rushed to Crouse Irving for an emergency C-section and thus I was born nine weeks early. I prayed the memories of my miraculous birth would keep her company as she went frightened, crying, and reaching out for my father into the operating room.
Three or four hours passed and the surgeon came to my family and told us my mother was on her way to recovery and that they were able to remove most of her cancer. We were all able to relax to a degree as we took this report as good news. Eventually, mother was able to return home where I became the initial care taker.
A short time later Mother had many check-ups with a few different doctors. It was during one of these check-ups that Mother's cancer was growing rapidly and was in stage three or four; the latest stages of ovarian cancer. If this was not hurtful enough to hear, another ugly face was masked on. The type of cancer she had was so rare the doctors were not even sure how to treat it other than by the traditional way of chemotherapy or radiation. Either way there were no guarantees. In addition, I was also to learn from my father that my mom didn't have any ovaries, not even any small pieces, at least none that could be seen.
At one point, Mother, seemed to be getting back to her busy self and I felt everything was going all right. But it was to be…only a hopeful, dying dream.
On one of the last, if not the last doctor's visit, Mother was to start chemotherapy, but there was a problem. She never made it that far. The antibiotics they gave her before hand made her so ill she was rushed by ambulance to the hospital where they kept her until she was stabilized. She had had an allergic reaction.
Everything went downhill from there. The moment Hospice came into our home and I learned what the service was all about, I knew I was losing my mother.
At 6:00AM, on a stormy April morning, Mother slipped into a painless, peaceful sleep, at the age of fifty-eight, just about two months shy of reaching her thirty-eighth wedding anniversary.
So why have I shared this extremely brief version of a painful part of my life? Simple. A nagging question, having arisen during my mother's illness continues to bother me: How could my mother have been diagnosed with a rare ovarian cancer when she had no ovaries?
