Bob Barnes

Where should I start, well it was 2000 when I came home from work and I saw my wife on our deck with friends. In the back in her car was a book the title escapes me right now but it was something like how to deal with breast cancer. So I asked my wife what the hell is that book doing in your car. That's when I found out about our new life battle. She went to her doctors appointment alone and got this devastating news. That right there should tell you the kind a women I married. She had just turned 40 and was in her 23rd of a great US Navy career. We later found out she had stage II lobular breast cancer. It started out a lump in her left breast that when she had it removed looked like a flank steak. They also remover 26 lymph nodes and of them 26 there were 23 that were malignant. We had a great surgeon Dr. Thomas Davis, LCDR, USN who took great care of her. After the surgery he had told me that she was so good on the table that he took pictures. In which I told him I wanted copies, and he did get them to me. Well chemo was rough and so was the radiation that followed. Then her cancer spread to up and down her spine, which was explained to us was like taking pepper and throwing it on a white sheet of paper. It also spread to her left hip. So lets move forward to just about the in the remission faze. She is now feeling pain in her abdomen which she goes row and row on what she wants the doctors to do next. This is a different doctor and they want to go in and explore. My wife Lori wanted a full hysterectomy, they said no explore. They went round and round and came up with removing her ovaries. Well you guessed it her breast cancer had moved to her ovaries. Thru all of this she was always going on-line gathering any and all information she could find. We as a family treated her disease with pray, love, and laughter lots of laughter. Again we are just about at another 5 year mark and she discovers that after eating a salad before the main dish that she would get full. Then after about 2 hours she was starving again. Even with calls from her oncology nurses to her third oncology doctor they took about 8 months before they found that her cancer again had spread by this time she was stage IV. So our next bump in the road was that it had now spread to her stomach. By the time that was discovered it filled 2/3's of her stomach. From there it moved to her large and small intestines to above and below her right eye, which required radiation. It moved next to her femur to her skull. So for the next four years she received chemo treatments while still working on her second career as an eight grade earth science teacher. She was teacher of the year and would truly hate taking a sick day for anything. She reluctantly had to retire because the cancer just made it so hard for her to go to work anymore. I never ever heard her she why me or poor me. In fact in 2006 we adopted our one and a half year old great nephew who had his own medical issues. He was born with bilateral club feet. He asked mom once "Why did God do this to us?" In true mother mode without skipping a beat she told him "That God only does this to the people he knows can handle it!" She spent the last year and a half in and out of the hospital, and in true teacher form if there was ever a chance to teach a nurse something new about what she was going thru she would. There were times that she felt she could go back to work but when you have cancer it is like your in a boxing match. Sometime you beat it into the ropes and sometimes it hits you into the ropes. We knew that the eventual winner would be cancer. Cancer TKO'd my wife on March 31, 2014 but not after a valiant battle! She was not going out without trying to show cancer what she had in store for it. Her oncology doctor once told me if she could give my wife a shot to take this all away from her she would in a second. As in Mandisa's songs "Overcomer" & "Stronger" she was and also Tim McGraw's song "Live Like You Were Dying!" She was and is my best friend and my hero and our family's super glue. There is not a day go by that I don't think of her and wish she was here with us right now. Everyday you live is another birthday for people with cancer. May the good Lord give you and your family the strength as you battle your cancer. Tomorrow isn't promised so make each day you wake up a memory.

God Bless,

Bob