Stanford Tackles Tough Tumors - Michelle perea's story

My name is Michelle Perea, and I'm from Tracy, California. I've always been very busy with my work, my career. We have four kids now and they're 16, 14, 8 and 6. Before I found out that something was wrong, I would go to the gym and I would work out, and I would be so tired. And I would think, "Gosh, normally I have kind of a second wind when I'm done here" and there'd be certain things that I couldn't do like laying flat on my stomach. I just felt like there was something there. I was slightly overweight and I mentioned it to my doctor, and she's like, "Well, you know, it's your later 30's, you're approaching 40, it's not as easy to lose weight as it was," and so I ended up kind of just passing it off. But finally in September, I was feeling more tired, I was feeling out of breath, I saw a different doctor, and she said, "You could have herniated something but just to make sure, we're gonna take a CT scan," and she said, "We won't have the results until next week some time." But it was the very next day she told me, "We found something on the CT scan. We're not sure what it is, but we want you to see an oncologist." I was 38 years old at the time. I remember thinking...immediately, I'm going to die. It took a while to get the biopsy done, and when she pulled up the chair to Mike and I when we were sitting in there, I knew the look on her face, that it wasn't good. And that's when she revealed, she was like, "It's a sarcoma, it's Stage IV, I have already talked to a few surgeons, and they said it's inoperable." It was actually completely wrapped around my aorta. I'm hearing it, and I'm like, Okay, so chemotherapy, radiation, what exactly are you saying? And she said, "You might have through the holidays." We went straight to Modesto Hospital and we met with the surgeon, and he did say to us, if there are any other alternatives out there that even I don't know about, you should look into it. So, at that point in time, I of course was on the phone with my mom, she was a nanny for a doctor, and so they started communicating with the sister of the doctor, she immediately said, "Where you guys are located, Stanford is not far, you need to go there and get a second opinion, because they do things that people don't even know about. " My first visit to Stanford I actually met with Doctor Ganjoo and immediately she wanted to present my case before the tumor board. I got the phone call, which was on my birthday. And the birthday gift for me was the tumor board has decided that we want to take on your case. Of course, I burst into tears, it was an emotional time. So, on the 17th, I actually met Dr. Norton for the first time, and, I remember him saying, "I gotta be honest with you, I'm not gonna say it's gonna be easy," but he's like, "I have a good feeling about this. " Dr. Harris was also on the surgical team. He told me the risk was that I could not survive the surgery, and because the tumor was growing so close to the spine, he said, there's a chance that you could be paralyzed. The surgery itself actually exceeded ten hours. Once they got inside, it was more than anyone expected. A lot of reconstruction. My mom said that she will never forget when Dr. Harris came out, he was just, like, he had been, you know, in a marathon. He's like, "We did it. " After I was out of ICU very first thing I did was I remember I tried to move my toes, move my feet, and when I did, I remember how much pain that was, I'd never felt so happy to feel so much pain. But, waking up and seeing my family and the doctors coming in and checking on me: "You did great, Michelle, the surgery, we got it. We did it. " I got routine scans every six months. So in 2010, I had a scan and when the scan came back, it showed disease. The second surgery, while they were in there, he found about ten other small tumors and a tumor in my vena cava. So now I have completed six weeks of radiation. I had an appointment today, which was great, my post radiation appointment. I just feel so lucky and so thankful that I had great doctors. They did a miracle when it came to me, because I was given the worst sentence, and I ended up having really a result that no one expected.