Ruby's battle with Cancer

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 Well I don’t know where to start, all I ever wanted to do was grow old together. She got shorted out of 30 years, she was always a go-getter, was into every thing at the kids school and church functions. Never smoked and drank, a model wife and mother, I still can’t understand why this had to happen.

  It started sometime in 1998 with some headaches, she went to the local Dr.’s here and had no luck. Even the hospital here didn’t seem like it was anything, no one ever ran an MRI, I really believe that if they would have it could have been caught in the early stages it might have been cured.
  She started going to the University Medical Center in Jackson, Ms. they seem to think it was all in her head, they said she didn’t have enough symptoms to warrant an MRI, all they ever wanted to do was shove pain pills at her. She couldn’t take any of those because it made her so sick. This went on for a year, she would go in for severe headaches and all they would do is a chest X-ray.        Then someone told her about Sharps clinic in Tylertown, Ms. Just a small clinic, but the first thing they did was order an MRI to be done in Jackson, (at the UMC) and they only scanned from the chin down to the shoulders. They found bone spurs in the neck spine. C5-C6 area so she setup an appointment with Dr. Charles Brent in Hattiesburg, Ms. He agreed to do the neck surgery on a Friday and go home Sunday, simple. Well all went very well he even said we could go home Saturday because she was doing so well. Then later that day she started acting funny, didn’t know me or the kids. So I immediately got the nurse and she called Dr. Brent, he knew something was very wrong, he did a CAT scan and MRI of her whole head. Then later that night at 2am he came in the room and told me and my son she had a massive tumor in the right frontal lobe of the brain. It had to come out now….no time to think about it.  So she had surgery the next morning, it took him 10 hours he said most Dr.’s would of gave up, but he got all of it he seen
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 It was the longest day in my life. When they finished she was in the ICU later and after only 2 hours she was talking to all of us and knew everything, the Lord was with us. Well she was up and walking around after a couple of days. When we went home it was a great time, as I thought she might never get to go home again! She was in for a long and hard battle, although she never had negative feeling that she let be known. She had the total amount of radiation a person could have in a lifetime first thing, we were very aggressive trying to kill this stuff off, I just knew we were going to beat this, we couldn't just stand by, they tried chemo and all. The first year was great, she could still drive and do things, then a small tumor showed up at the backside where he remover the other one. She let him go right in and take it out, he put in Glider wafers (chemo implants) in the brain itself, trying to kill all the bad cells that might be left. Well we had  six months or so with good hopes, then an MRI showed something deep in the middle of the skull, couldn't get to it to operate. So we did scans every month or to watch it, our worst fears, it was growing. Swelling started to give her headaches so the Dr. had to put in a shunt at the back of her left ear to drain off fluid, it worked!

We kept doing scans and trying all kinds of chemo, then her left arm started to quit working and later the left leg got worse. We never gave up, she was taking up to 12 -15 different RX a month , these were bad drugs, it did a number on her body. She never gave up, she had probably three different blood transfusions because of the chemo killing her blood cells. This last time was just to much,
her body couldn't rebuild the blood cells back.
  I was there by here side to the end, it was the hardest thing I ever had to do, was watch her draw her last breath. I will always love her, thanks to her I have plenty of good memories.........
 
 

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