My name is Avie.  I’ve been married to my best friend for 10 years and together we have three beautiful children (Jamie, Paige, and Elijah).

We love each other.  We love the Lord.  We love jiu jitsu.

I was diagnosed with Stage 2 Aggressive Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma of the Lung (PMBCL) on June 1, 2017.  This blog is about my story and dealing with cancer…it’s just beginning but I wanted to put it down somewhere…even if no one reads it but me to remind myself of the things I might not be able to remember down the line because of the chemo…no filter, no fluff, just what I’m going through and how I’m getting through it…

Learning to breathe again…by learning to lean on Him…

-Avie

LIFE BEFORE LYMPHOMA

How did you figure it out? That’s probably the most frequent question that I’ve been asked recently….the truth is…I didn’t.  Since November of 2016, I had been the poster girl for the “normal” working mom.  I tried to eat healthy, I was just starting to really train seriously in jiu jitsu, I ran a busy house with my husband with our three little tiny humans and two dogs.  In December of 2016, I started gaining weight…a lot of it…my face would be swollen like I had gotten stung by a bee one morning and then the next day I would be ok…

Discouraged and frustrated, I decided to start consulting with different doctors…Was it a thyroid issue? Was it my diet? Was it that I wasn’t working out enough? After a few months of getting the run-around and having to be told by more than one “specialist” that I was just getting older and the weight was just coming off slower or that I wasn’t working out enough or cutting back my caloric intake (even though I was only eating 900 calories a day…) – I had had enough with doctors.  I pushed forward, hoping that taking natural supplements (Maca Root, Vitamin D, Magnesium) and switching to the Keto diet would start working.

In January, my husband started noticing that I was snoring in bed…something that I have NEVER done, but I wrote it off as the extra weight that I needed to lose.  I was tired all the time, my back ached, I was cold all the time…all symptoms of what I thought was hypothyroidism but couldn’t get a doctor to properly diagnose me…and I was having a hard time training because I couldn’t catch my breath…and still I tacked it all to my jiu jitsu and needing to drop weight.

In March, our family got hit with the nasty flu that hit SoCal.  Tim had been diagnosed with pneumonia and my trip to Urgent Care resulted in no x-rays, just the same prescription that they had given to Tim – antibiotics and pain reliever for a mild case of bronchitis.  I thought the Keto diet was starting to work…I had gone from 143 in December to 135 in April….and then I started turning blue while I was training.

In early May, I rolled with my Coach who noticed that I was wheezing.  I wasn’t a smoker and I wasn’t THAT overweight…there should have been no reason for me to be wheezing unless my allergies were pretty severe, but again I wrote it off to needing more time to train and needing to adjust my body.  I had gotten down to 127 lbs at that point and figured that relief would be coming soon.  On the Thursday before Memorial Day, I fell out of training…on the first warm-up lap.  My face literally turned purple and I was ready to pass out….head over to my first official blog post for the beginning of the story…

This post originally appeared on Breathing Again. It is republished with permission.