Jamie Crowell: Determined to fight

When Jamie Crowell heard the doctor say she had breast cancer, she says she couldn't breathe. "I couldn't catch my breath."

She got the news over the phone when she was at work, and had to go straight into a meeting. She ended up revealing to the group that she had just received the diagnosis.

Trying to be supportive, her co-workers immediately began sharing their own experiences with breast cancer. She was flooded with stories, both positive and negative. Crowell says she just wasn't ready to hear all that and she left the meeting and headed for home.

"I was so upset I had to pull off the road," she says. "I was screaming and yelling like I thought I never would."

As she struggled to come to grips with the diagnosis, she had restless nights.

"For four or five nights, I woke up crying or screaming," she says.

Crowell says that a couple of weeks before she went to the doctor, she had found a lump in her breast, and even though she feared she may have cancer, she didn't want to go and have that confirmed. She was due for her annual exam, so she waited.

Her worst fears confirmed, she learned the details. She had triple negative-invasive carcinoma. The growth was 2.5 centimeters. She was at the beginning of Stage II, and the type of cancer she had was very aggressive.

At that point, she says the process of her treatment stalled, as she waited for further test results. Though she felt she had a ticking time bomb inside her, a month following the diagnosis, she still had received no treatment from the local hospital from which she sought treatment.

During that agonizing period in limbo, she went to St. Louis to get a second opinion from doctors at another medical facility.

"I wanted to see what else was out there," she says.

She was told she could enter a drug trial and anxiously awaited its beginning. Just a few days before she was scheduled to receive her first treatment, her name was pulled off the trial.

After more frustration and angst, she got on the internet and began researching other treatment options.

She saw information about a facility in Chicago, Cancer Treatment Center of America (CTCA), and decided to call and find out more.

"I called on Tuesday, and by Thursday I was on a plane to Chicago," she says. CTCA flew her and her husband there at no cost to them, and put them up in a hotel. The following morning she went for a consultation.

"I was there from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Friday," Crowell says. "They did more for me in that time than the other two hospitals did for me in a month."

After more extensive testing, including an MRI and an echocardiogram, she met with a team of professionals, including an oncologist, a nutritionist and a naturopathic doctor, each of whom would each handle a different aspect of her treatment.

She and her husband took the weekend to discuss her options, and Monday morning she went for her first treatment at CTCA.

"They treated me, not just my cancer," she says.

The chemotherapy protocol at CTCA called for four treatments, versus the 16 she would have had at a local hospital. Each treatment was to include three drugs used for treating breast cancer.

Before she began her first chemotherapy treatment, her tumor had reached 3.5 centimeters.

Following that initial treatment, she returned home but got sicker, and ended up in the hospital in Cape Girardeau. She had colitis, which she was told she probably had prior to starting chemotherapy, and that it had likely been exacerbated by the treatment.

She went back to Chicago for her next round of chemotherapy, and her oncologist told her the colitis was a reaction to one of the three drugs, which he removed from her treatment regimen.

"The doctor said, 'If you get sick, I'm not doing my job,'" Crowell says.

She finished her final chemotherapy treatment the third week in September, and says she had done very well with her body tolerating the treatments well enough that she has been able to continue working the entire time.

During her last chemotherapy treatment, her oncologist told her he couldn't even feel the lump.

She's entering another treatment phase now, and is dealing with worries about what comes next. Crowell has a long road ahead, including surgery and 33 rounds of radiation.

But the surgery won't be as bad as she anticipated. Crowell says after her initial diagnosis, she was convinced she would have a double mastectomy, but her oncologist says a lumpectomy is all that is needed.

"I'm extremely confident about this," she says.

She has had a good mental outlook, thanks in part, she says, to all the support she has received from her husband, family and friends, with whom she had a "head shaving party," after her hair started falling out. Her sister and cousin both shaved their heads, too, in a show of solidarity.

Crowell has gotten involved in support groups and other programs designed for cancer patients, and now wants to help others who may be struggling with breast cancer, too. She encourages anyone who'd like to talk to email her at Jamie.crowell40@gmail.com.

"The 'Pink Family' is not one you want to be a part of, but when you are, it's pretty amazing," she says.