Why was I feeling so horrible? At this point, I’m still blaming all the fun I had on my first sunny vacation. 

I’m unable to sleep, which at that time was not out of the ordinary… I somehow could stay awake for almost 24 hours and just take slight naps and keep existing. When I would finally get little bits of sleep, I would wake up with the most earth shattering headache, to call this a head – ache is the understatement of the century. This was my head in an antique vice being literally squeezed until my eyeballs would fly out.

I would keel over and just grab onto my head for dear life thinking it would quite literally explode.

Next direction, settle down and find a career you love, done!

I got my first real career, no longer did I have a job. I had something that made me focused, driven, and full of fire!

Except for….. 

Every.single.day – imagine your morning routine being interrupted at the exact same point (drying my hair) and feeling this:

Blow drying your hair through hot flashes and heart beats that feel like knife stabs, only to finish and your hair be soaked wet all over again… but with sweat. 

Then you go completely pale, and you can no longer hold onto that brush you were using because your hand is shaking so hard you may injure yourself. Your heart starts beating so uncontrollably, it must be a heart attack, it has to be, what does a heart attack feel like?! (I don’t know, I’m only 18!) 

Don’t forget the nausea, oh it’s coming… oh.. there it is. All of a sudden you vomit, and can’t stop, it keeps coming, until you can no longer move… 

After you vomit, you’re basically a puddle of nothing and manage to have one last seizure like spasm for a good five minutes. Meanwhile you’re just stuck to the cold, ceramic tile… waiting for this ‘attack’ to pass so for the love of god you can go and finish your hair, put on your make up, pretend you’re a normal human being and go to work.

Is that so much to ask?!

Two to three months go by at my amazing new job, nothing has changed on the ‘lose my shit’ daily routine but I’m kicking ass and so I stop caring that I’m involuntarily bulimic and move on!

Routine number two, I come home from work, make dinner, and then do a good hard workout. Every.single.day

Now I’m not only losing my shit in the morning, I’m mid work out and all of a sudden it’s like…. one snap of the fingers, and I’m in that bathroom, vomiting and convulsing…. 

Oh… just another Tuesday
So when do you start to panick? Well, when you’re an otherwise healthy eighteen year old… you just need to lay off the ol’ Starbucks and get more shuteye. Haha, okay! Good as new… NOT!*&@*@**@**@*@^#(*&&

(These daily ‘attacks’ of my body hating me lasted for over a year in total)

Until one night, it was bad. Like, I’m dying bad. Call the ambulance because I am no longer recuperating like normal, and whatever you do… I’m not leaving this beautiful cold bathroom floor. I’m now 19 and I’m having an actual heart attack, or dying, I guess both… I can’t tell.

Ambulance comes, takes my vitals, blood pressure and heart rate are okay, “she’s fine, we don’t need to take her in”. (This won’t be the last time I hear something like this)

That’s when my mother was no longer accepting this “Her eyes are in the back of her head and she has chest pain that resembles a heart attack! What is wrong with you? You’re taking her in!”

One very slow ambulance ride later (clearly I was not an emergency) I arrived at the hospital.

*These misdiagnosis are not uncommon, this is almost identical to every patient history you will read with someone who has pheochromocytoma, sadly*

So many questions, so many blood tests within 15 minutes… All I could remember was what a great tan I had when they were assaulting my skin with little suckers again to measure my heart activity, again..normal. My chest pain is still there, still dying thank you. 

The nurse comes back and reads in my blood test that my potassium level is dangerously low, and I MUST drink this horrid yellow poison berry drink… na uh sister! Didn’t I just tell you I was violently ill and I’M DYING…. THIS WILL NOT BE MY LAST DRINK!

So then after I’ve kind of been treated like I was just overdosing on the local meth or whatever kids were doing those days.. they run in and declare I have heart damage! I did in fact have a heart attack, well WOODOOBEEDOOP! Apparently I’m supposed to be happy that my heart just had a trauma for absolutely NO reason…. and this has been happening for a year, how many heart attacks did I need to have for someone to believe me.

So I’m admitted, drugged to oblivion due to the pain and stress it caused my heart and chest… and now I just sleep…

 for the first time in what feels like an eternity.. I sleep

I awake to a colleague, equipped with my favourite vegetarian Subway sandwich, a fruit salad, and a teddy bear dog that is actually a kleenex holder, but the cutest of mistakes someone can make.

Everything seems better suddenly, it’s all going to be normal again. I’m fine.  

I get discharged after 4 days, apparently the hospital agrees with me and I was perfectly alright with that because I desperately needed my nails done.

During my nail therapy session I am interrupted by a phone call from another hospital, an angry one, specifically a heart institute “You were never supposed to be discharged, there’s a mistake. You NEED to come get admitted to our facility right away!”

Oh god, the doom fairy is back. So I took my sweet time, did some cute hospital attire shopping, and eventually made my way in later that day, having no idea why or how long I was going to be there.

Turns out I was there for three months, half of which they still had no idea what was wrong with me… I got these ‘attacks’ every day, even in the hospital, and they couldn’t help me.. it was the most unusual feeling. Being in a place that is designed to heal you, to comfort you, and I felt worse and more confused every day.

All I knew was that I was the youngest one there.. by about 50 years or so, and I had the worse vitals out of everyone. Yesssss! Oh wait no, not good to win in this case.

One day, a whole team of doctors walk into my room. I’m having a brat moment like “Finally, they realize I’m important, jeez.. took you long enough!”

This will be my first encounter with pheochromocytoma, the first time I will have ever heard the term, the first time someone will finally put a name to my suffering… but little did I know, it won’t be the last time I’d heard about it, this will be my diagnosis, this will be the moment my life changed forever. 

Doctor: “How are you feeling?”

Me: “Well…. I’ve been missing work and stuck in a hospital hooked up to a monitor in which I can’t travel more than a few feet with… I vomit everyday and feel like my heart is being squeezed by pliers and then my head imploded and I think I’m dead, but here I am…!” (still looking fab 😉 ) 

Doctor: “You have pheochromocytoma, we didn’t think there was any possibility .. we didn’t look there first.. it didn’t make sense, only 1 in 2 million people have this.. this is what’s been causing all of your symptoms” 

Me: “Great! So we know what it is… well wait, what is it exactly!?”

Doctor: “You have a rare tumor, it’s on your adrenaline gland. What we need to do now, is take it out. We need to prep you for surgery with medication that will lower your blood pressure to avoid a crisis during surgery, meet your surgeon, let’s start this” 

Like… WOWOWOWOWO can’t a girl have a moment to take this in? A tumor? I have cancer? 

Doctor: “No, they are normally benign, but we will not know until we take it out. It is very dangerous to keep inside of you, it is secreting mass amounts of hormones, specifically adrenaline.. it has already caused two mini strokes and cardiovascular damage, we need to get you into the CT and find this tumor to prepare for surgery” 

Can somebody say OHMYLANTA, slow your roll.. something…. help me

I then got a 2 week break to prep for surgery, the meds made me so dizzy I couldn’t even walk, I would bruise by the simplest touch, and I felt even more horrible everyday.

Time came for surgery, I was only nervous the night before. It was hell, luckily I had someone special to help me through the hardest point in my life…

I went in to the OR, I can recall the anesthesiologist was saying I could eat a big steak once I’m better, my last words were “Gross.. I don’t eat animals… I’m vegan” and then poof, I’m out.

Little did I know… the next time I would be waking up a survivor, not in the way you would think

Read: My First Surgery

I woke up to that same guy who brought me the vegetarian subway, the fruit salad, and the teddy bear kleenex box holder.. and said “I wanna go to mexico, take me to mexico, ok I love you” and again…. sleep, this new thing I do allllllll the time!

The next time I woke up, it was probably 2 days after my surgery… the first thing I noticed was that my toe nails were painted. Weird, they were naked when I came in..and now they’re painted. Cool, nail polish fairy. The next thing I noticed was not so pretty:

Ow, pain, so much pain. How can I feel so much pain?! Why are they not drugging me? Why does it hurt so much?!?!

This is when the surgical team comes in, they tell me i’ve been out for a couple of days. Some of them are crying, some of them smiling like I make them so happy. My anesthesiologist says “You’re a little fighter aren’t you, you scared the shit out of me” while wiping a tear away. Okay seriously guys.. what’s going on? Do you do this with all of your post op patients, weirdos.

They then began to explain there was complications removing my tumor, which was soft ball size by the way.. the laparoscopic plan went south quick, they cut my vena cava and I bled, and bled, and bled.. 4 blood transfusions, a very large quick incision, removal of the ribs, shocking my heart, trying to get me back. I died for three whole minutes on that table, because guess what? You touch the tumor while operating… it’s a grenade, it will kill you if not manipulated properly. What they don’t tell you? Is how you have a lot of main arteries that allow you to live, that are extremely close to the tumor and adrenal gland they need to remove. After a quick fix of the vena cava, and a whole lot of emergency protocol (3 minutes, that’s a long time if you count on a watch) I came back to life. Thank you God. If you ever watch Grey’s Anatomy, it’s a very dramatic scene when someone gets saved on the operating table… I was a real life medical reality miracle.

I woke up to the love of my life that day, the man who barely knew me and ‘dated’ me while facing a serious illness. The man who instead of signing up for a regular relationship, hopped onto the most unpredictable roller coaster you can get. He loved me, all of me, through anything. He chose to take care of me during the most difficult and confusing parts of my life, knowing it would never be the same for me from that point on. He came and never left, and he’s still here today… When your date hears the words ‘stool’ and ‘tumor’ and any other embarrassing or horrifying thing you can think of in the initial dating phase and wants nothing more but to love you, and take care of you in a literal sense, he’s a keeper. In that moment, I didn’t care about the rare tumor that just invaded my body, the fact that I had just died, the pain I felt everywhere, the ‘why me?’ – I just wanted to thank god for allowing me to wake up from it all and having him there to help me get through it.

I am still so thankful for each day I am given to live, I am thankful that even though I have an incredibly rare disease.. I also have an incredibly rare bond that not everyone has the honor of feeling. My tragedy brought me my soul mate, and I will be forever grateful for that.

PS- the nail polish fairy that painted my toes while I was unconscious was my previously mentioned date (now husband) – PPS my nails were fabulous babe!

Pheo VS Fabulous ❤