How I Found Out I had Cervical Cancer Mila The Patient Story

When I was first diagnosed, I couldn't even say the word cancer, let alone tell people that I had cancer. I was kind of sitting there and the first feeling was shock, I would say, probably. And then for me, I was sitting there and the doctor was my OB who had told me. She was sitting next to me talking, kind of showing me what it potentially looked like and describing kind of next steps. I was sitting there staring at the ground. I couldn't really look at her, I couldn't really look my boyfriend in the face because I knew that if I looked up, I would just start bawling. Hi, I'm Mila Lazarevsky and I am a cervical cancer survivor. There were about two months before I was diagnosed, I started feeling this little lump inside of my cervix. It turned out to be inside my cervix. And I didn't really know what it was. It wasn't painful or anything, it was just kind of there. And then about a month before my diagnosis, I started bleeding after sex every time, which I later found out is the biggest indication of cancer. But the way that I was diagnosed was just from a routine pap smear, came back with irregular results with I think it was squamous cell carcinoma. And I already knew that I had HPV, so I wasn't really worried about it. And they told me to get a colposcopy. I actually ended up putting that off for a couple months because I had a trip planned to the Bahamas. I just started a new job. It wasn't something that I was really prioritizing. And because I had already known that I had HPV when I was 19, I thought it was just something kind of related but not a big deal. So when I went to go get my colposcopy, it was probably in the beginning of August, and I had had a follow-up appointment set up with my doctor to come in about a week later to get my results back and talk. She actually ended up calling me a couple of days after that initial appointment and asking me to come in, which raised a little bit of a red flag but not too much. I thought maybe I have an infection or something. And then when I came in, I actually had brought my boyfriend at the time with me to the appointment because she had asked me to bring someone with me, which also for some reason at the time didn't set off that big of a red flag but should have. And that's when she told me. My stage was 1B1, which means that there was a tumor, but it was below, I think, 1.3 centimeters, but it was larger than, I think, one-something centimeters. Because of the staging that I had, I had something called a radical trachelectomy, which is where they just take the piece of the cervix. I think it was two inches or so. And luckily, my doctor was trained in doing that type of surgery, and he also did it laparoscopically and was trained on the da Vinci machine. So we were able to not have to—I was able to not have to have a hysterectomy. So after I had the surgery, if my lymph nodes had come back clean, that would have been the end of it. I was actually sitting in my oncologist's office when he got the results because they hadn't come in yet. So he called the lab to find out the results. So I found out at the same time as him that it had metastasized to two of the, I think, six or eight lymph nodes that he had taken a test. And then immediately in that office, we were sitting there. He called a colleague of his who was a radiation oncologist to get me set up with an appointment with him. And we started—we laid out a plan for my chemo and radiation regimen. Also immediately in that appointment, I brought up the question of fertility. He didn't bring it up. I brought it up. Because it was something that I knew would affect my fertility. Luckily, my cancer wasn't as aggressive, so I was able to put off starting my chemo and radiation regimen for the four-week cycle of IVF to go through that process. The chemo and radiation started at the same time. So radiation was every single day for—I think it was 25 sessions, except for weekends. So I would go in the mornings to radiation. Prior to that, I had to get fitted for—or they had to measure me. And they actually gave me three little tiny dot tattoos that are some good souvenirs for me on my pelvis going forward. So it's funny I joke about I have three tattoos. But for the lasers to go into the same place every time, they gave me these tattoos. I got measured. And then I would go in every morning, wait for kind of, I guess, my turn for the radiation. And then I would lay down on this machine that did the radiation, lay there for—the process itself took about 10 minutes. It didn't hurt. It was totally fine. You just kind of lay there in this loud machine. I mean, the radiation itself, I didn't really necessarily feel it. I did have—my skin was a lot more prone to lesions. And it was really sensitive. And it kind of felt like—it didn't feel the sunburn necessarily that you would feel with other different types of radiation. But it was really kind of, I would say, brittle. And if I would get a scratch or something, it wouldn't go away. I would have to put lotion on it. And then also, for me, because it was pelvic radiation, it wasn't—I couldn't really have sex because it was a pretty painful process. So the first chemo that I underwent was—it was called Cisplatin, I think. And it was fairly neurotoxic. I was actually supposed to go through six sessions, but I ended up going through only four because I had ringing in my ears. And that was a neuropathy that my doctor was saying, if that doesn't go away, you could actually lose hearing. So we lowered the number of chemo sessions that I did, luckily. And at first, when I started doing chemo, it was purely done through an IV in my veins. But then I have pretty small veins, so I would get these giant bruising all over my arms. And it was really difficult for them to find a vein. And for that first round of chemo, I got a PICC line, which was honestly really more annoying than anything else because you just have this plastic tube sticking out of your arm for a couple months while you're getting chemo. And then that plastic tube has a catheter, basically, inside so that it doesn't necessarily have to go through the veins in your arms. But you can't really shower. It's really uncomfortable to sleep. You have to get them cleaned, and you have to go in to get them cleaned. And in the beginning, it's fairly painful while it's healing, and you kind of just have this hole in your arm with this tube sticking out of it. I was still working through this whole process, so I would actually be on my laptop working on those days. I had a few client fires that I had to put out, which was really funny because I was on these phone calls and on my laptop answering these emails during those sessions. But I felt totally fine. And then in the days afterwards is when I would start feeling really bad when the steroids would wear off. So I would say not even the day after because I would still have a little bit of steroids in my system, but the second day after chemo, the second and third days and fourth were the worst. I would be really tired, really extremely nauseous, very sensitive to smells, and I actually couldn't taste anything. So I lost my sense of taste, but my sense of smell was really heightened. So even the smell of coffee or the smell of cologne, which I usually love the smell of cologne, it would just make me feel really, really sick. I couldn't eat anything, and I lost a lot of weight. The only thing that I really could eat were carrots and celery, maybe dry toast. And my one saving grace, I still love these even when I see them now because it reminds me of this time, but in a happy way. Those Belvita blueberry crackers, those breakfast crackers, those and carrots and celery were the only thing that I could eat. So I ate a lot of those during that time. I tried taking anti-nausea medication. I think there's one called Ondatetron or something, and then they gave me another one. Those honestly didn't work for me at all. And to be honest, the absolute only thing that worked for me were weed edibles, not even smoking or vaping. Those would not work quite enough. But as soon as I would eat an edible and it would kick in, I felt totally fine and I was able to eat. The other effect of it is that I was really high. So I would usually take them in the evenings to help me go to sleep. But yeah, that weed was honestly the only thing that made me feel normal. The only day, the day that I would feel the best in that time frame was the day right before chemo. It's kind of a wave, so you feel okay on the day of chemo and then it kind of goes downhill from there. I'd say probably day four was the worst day. And then right when you're feeling better, day five and day six, then comes around day seven and you're getting chemo again. Second chemo I would say is better. In terms of the pain itself, I didn't feel any sort of pain. They would give me these steroids that I would actually take before and after. And those, I don't remember, I think it was dexamethasone. Those steroids just like, I feel like it's probably meth. I mean, meth is in the name. So I would just be, I was able for those rounds of chemo, I would actually go into the office during my non-chemo days and be functional and be working. I was able to eat. I didn't feel sick at all. And it just felt like normal, except for the days that I had chemo, I felt totally normal. The days that I did have chemo for me were a little bit harder because that was the round of chemo that I did cold caps. And to do those, you're basically giving yourself, I call it like a little brain freeze. The second you put on this cold cap, which is a temperature of, I think it's like negative 32 degrees Celsius, because you keep it in dry ice, you just can't function. So I wasn't really able to work during those sessions of chemo. So for me, being able to keep my hair was extremely important because I didn't want people knowing that I had cancer without me telling them. I wanted control of that information. And I still lost my eyebrows and I still lost my eyelashes. But being able to keep my hair, I think that having your hair is a signal of health. So whenever you see people that don't have hair, you might think that either they're balding or maybe they're going through cancer. And I really just didn't want it to be a statistic for someone or a representation of something that they're thinking. And I actually had multiple times people tell me that I had instances like when I went to a bar or somewhere, where I did actually tell people, and their initial response is, but you look healthy, which anybody that knows me or knew me during that time knows that you absolutely do not say that to someone who's going through something because that, and I don't know how others would feel about it, but for me, it really enraged me. But the process afterwards, I would say that life kind of went back to normal in that I was just going, I was working. I was, the fatigue did last for a while afterwards, from what I remember, going to regular doctor's appointments, so still going into the hospital and going to see my doctor to get checked that everything looked fine. I did start seeing a pelvic physical therapist, which was recommended to me by my radiation oncologist, and I'm very happy that I did. So he talked to me about what could happen if I didn't, which was if you don't do certain exercises or if you don't kind of stretch like a muscle, radiation really kind of shrinks things and it makes things constrict, and the same thing goes with your vagina. With cervical cancer or with pelvic radiation, if you don't stretch it out or dilate it regularly, there is a chance that your vagina could shrink down to a really small, I think something like 2 inches, he said, maybe even smaller, and there are certain exercises to do. For me, because I had surgery as well, and surgery and radiation in that area, I had a lot of scar tissue, and the muscles were kind of just really constricted and just like there was a ton of trauma done to that area. So if you think about what you do when there's trauma, you kind of just tense up. One thing that I found to be interesting and a little bit difficult was the fact that there wasn't really anybody to help with the financial aspect of things, and it's really inefficient. So you can be charged for, let's say you go to a doctor visit and you get some sort of a lab done or something, you'll get multiple bills from multiple different providers from your doctor or from that lab, maybe from someone else, for that same visit, and unless you're really keeping track and you kind of call them, it's really confusing. And the other thing I found is that there can be, so the process that I found that worked the best for me to kind of try to make sense of this was calling my insurance, when I had all of these bills in front of me with their reference numbers, keeping track of the dates in a spreadsheet of the appointments that I had and what was done in those appointments so that I can reference back to those, calling my insurance provider and seeing what they paid out and what maybe wasn't paid out and figuring that out. Talking to them, I realized that a lot of the times providers might give the wrong reference number or they might say something or they might try to bill something that's different. It's not a fluid process. It's not automatic. It's people behind this process, so there's tons of human error that happens that affects you in potentially the thousands of dollars. And unless you call maybe like two or three times to different places and figure out where the error might be, why something was billed the way that it was, you're just going to be stuck paying those thousands of dollars which could have been maybe $100 or something else. It adds up. All of those mistakes add up on your end. I absolutely stand behind being your own advocate in multiple ways, so going into the doctor and getting a second opinion in the very beginning, doing your research before you go into the appointment of different avenues of things. So maybe your doctor has one avenue of treatment and you've looked up something else that might be a little bit more experimental that you want to try and they're maybe more conservative. So you absolutely need to take ownership and do your own research so that you're prepared when you come into the office, into those appointments, and you can actively participate in your treatment plan. Secondly, really kind of being your own advocate in saying that if something doesn't feel right, bringing that up and not letting it go. So for example, if you don't feel right, if you go into the hospital, doctors have a certain playbook. They know to look for certain symptoms. They know to look for certain conditions and parameters, but outside of that, they don't think too much outside the box and you might be an edge case. So unless you advocate for yourself and you're a voice, your situation could get worse. And the message that I want to get out there is that you can get through it. It's going to be hard. You're going to need support, but there will be a day where you look back on that time and it will be far in your rearview mirror and you'll go on with your life and it will strengthen the person that you are and it will help you see life for what it is and not stress nearly as much about the everyday little minutia because the good news is you're alive and you don't have cancer.