Family support vital as Newsome battles cancer

Every year at this time there are many reunions and celebrations of family, high school graduations and other milestones reached.

One of the foremost annual events is the Fayette County Relay for Life, an all-night event featuring various activities and entertainment, as well as a community walk in celebration of life by cancer survivors, and families, neighbors and friends of the many whose lives have been touched by the disease.

Relay for Life also is an effort to make people aware of the hope and success of survival, the importance of early detection, the options available for treatment and the strides made, not only in past years, but every day.

There is also a special luminary service that is poignant, but beautiful and reverent, during which the names of those who have died from cancer are read as a candle glows in each one’s memory.

This year, 32- year-old wife and mother, Lisa Newsome, has joined this special alumni as a cancer survivor.

Lisa and her husband, Eric, have two children: Dalton, age 9, and Emmalee, a happy and vivacious 3-year-old girl. The story is really the whole family’s story, as Eric and Dalton faithfully and tenderly cared for and helped Lisa throughout her treatments, and little Emmalee wanted to stay by her side.

Lisa’s Story

Lisa Newsome’s medical history held no indication of cancer in her family until her grandmother, Virginia Clark, was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Lisa was diagnosed with a rare, fast-growing cancer in her right breast in April 2008.

“My grandma had lung cancer, but she had been a smoker, and she died at age 84,” Lisa said.

“My great-aunt, who is 95, said that this was the only case of breast cancer in our whole family that she knows of,” Newsome said.

“I found a knot in my armpit under my right arm last April, and it hurt, which was a little surprising,” she said. “I had mammograms and sonograms, and they didn’t think it was anything to be concerned about. But my gynecologist, Dr. Haller, recommended that it be taken out anyway, because it was painful.”

Newsome had it removed in June.

“When the surgeon came out, she was acting kind of weird,” she said. “That was on Friday. I called her Monday, and she didn’t have the results back yet. Then she called me at home on Tuesday, and she asked me if my husband was with me. Then she told me I had breast cancer. I asked her, ‘What do I do now?’”

Newsome was diagnosed with medullary carcenoma, one of the rarest of breast cancers; it’s between 4 and 7 percent of all cancers diagnosed. Usually found in post-menopausal women, it is rare to have it at age 31.

The doctor recommended that Lisa go to Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis.

“I went to Dr. Aft, and she did another surgery, because the margins weren’t clear. She removed the lymph nodes to be sure it hadn’t spread to the lymph nodes, and it hadn’t,” Newsome said.

She’s had complications after the surgery, during the healing process. “Then I met with Dr. Dye, and we did the chemotherapy. Then, after I got done with the chemo, we did 33 treatments of radiation.”

“Chemo was pretty rough,” she said.

“There were days when I slept all day. The only thing I could really hold down was scrambled eggs. My husband would come in and just basically feed me scrambled eggs. That was about all I did for three or four days.”

She continued to work at the federal prison in Greenville, but not on her regular job as an officer. “They were good to me. They let me sit in an office and do what I could do. They accommodated me real well,” she said.

She underwent 12 radiation treatments, one every other week.

She was concerned about the effect her illness would have on the children, so she involved them in the progression of the treatment effects.

“When my hair began to fall out, Dalton shaved it off, and Emmelee helped a little bit, as did my nieces, so they weren’t too shocked.

“I was afraid that if they didn’t see the whole process, they would be really shocked when they saw me bald.”

Some of her treatments were six to eight hours long and involved “many needle sticks.”

“The cancer was actually fed by my body’s own hormones,” she said. “I’m taking medicine now that suppresses my estrogen production, because the tumor grew from eating the progestin in my body.

“So if we can suppress the production of those hormones, there is less chance the chance the same cancer will come back,” she said.

Comments and Concerns

The cancer she had was very fast-growing, but it was very treatable. The prognosis would probably been less hopeful and her story could have had a very different ending had she not decided to seek further advice.

“I did put it off for several months, because the radiologist thought it was nothing to be concerned about. So I waited until I saw Dr. Haller, and she thought it should come out of there.”

“I think that young people are so wrapped up in their lives that we forget that cancer can happen to us and it does happen to us,” Lisa said.

“You have to trust your body’s instinct. Leading up to my diagnosis, I had been feeling tired and rundown,” she said.

“I had been having some blood tests ran; I knew something wasn’t right with my body. It didn’t feel right – my energy and my moods weren’t right.

“You need to trust that little voice in tour head, that gut instinct, and if somebody tells you not to worry about something and your instinct is telling you to get it checked out, you need to get it checked out by somebody else,” Lisa said.

“You have choices in your treatment. If a physician tells you to do something and it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t seem right, research other options.

“Check your physician’s credentials, how many procedures they have done. It’s OK to interview a doctor, because they hold your life in their hands and you deserve the best,” she said.

“The community really came together and helped me. I had friends at work who brought me dinner three nights a week. A girlfriend came and cleaned my house. She and my parents, John and Sharon Anderson, would come and watch the kids,” she said.

“The American Cancer Society gave me a wig and make-up,” Lisa said.

Difficult for her to bear were the looks of pity when she was out in public. “You get real pity looks, like ‘that poor young mother.’ Sometimes I just wanted to run away and cry.

“People weren’t trying to be mean, you could just see it in their face. I was pretty strong-willed, and I didn’t want pity.”

She still has scars, but her hair has grown back and she is doing well. A very recent mammogram “looked good,” and her outlook is great.

She would be glad to talk to anyone who is fighting cancer or friends and family members of someone battling the disease.

Eric said that it was the most frightening thing that has happened to them as a family. Family was the key word for the support she needed and received throughout the treatments and emotional ordeal.