Woman battles rare cancer

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff

All Penny French Garrett wanted to do was sleep.
“It was hard to go to the couch to the bathroom and back some days,” she said.
She’d lay on the couch at her home in Damascus while her kids were at school and when it was time for them to come home, she’d try to perk up and clean up, hoping to shield them from how she felt on the inside.
It all started about six months before, with a lower back pain that she blamed on sitting in the bleachers, watching her kids play ball.
When she went in for her annual exam in November 2008, her gynecologist found fibroid tumors. The only treatment was to remove them and have a hysterectomy, so she made an appointment to have the surgery over her kids’ winter break. She started noticing that her pants began fitting a little tighter and her stomach was bigger than normal. She went to the doctor again, to talk about the hysterectomy. She found out, though, that the tumors had grown fast. Surgery would be the next morning. The doctor told her that her uterus was the size of someone who’s three to four months pregnant.
“He didn’t say it but that was the point when he thought I had cancer,” Garrett said. “It was a shock. You’re not ready to give up the life that you know.”
That afternoon she tied up loose ends at her office at the Bristol Mall and decided that she was going to miss her son’s first band concert.
After the surgery, her fears were confirmed. It was cancer – a rare cancer called uterine leiomyosarcoma.
“I’d never heard of it,” Garrett said. “You hear of breast cancer and lung cancer. I didn’t realize there are so many. Four in a million have leiomyosarcoma … A general oncologist might go through their entire career without seeing a sarcoma patient.”
The surgeon removed a 12-centimeter long mass, but couldn’t get it all. Still, Garrett said her doctor felt certain that if she went through chemotherapy everything would be fine.
So, after consulting with two other oncologists, she went through four three-week cycles of treatments in Bristol.
“Sitting and facing all these other people getting chemo really hits you that you’re sick,” she said. “It was really hard on me.”
And it got harder.
After the chemo, a scan showed some hotspots had metastasized to her lungs.
“That’s the point my local oncologist said I’d need a miracle,” she said. “It was like being diagnosed all over again. I’d been through four rounds of chemo and it didn’t work. You’re left with very little hope. At that point a lot of people would have given up and tried to enjoy the time they have left…. I was at the point I would have just gone home.”
Olivia French, Garrett’s sister, entered the picture the day after the bad news broke. She searched the Internet for stories of people with similar experiences to Garrett’s.
“She tried to find out where we needed to go for help,” Garrett said.
And she found a sarcoma specialist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
In the past year, Garrett’s had 17 rounds of chemo and been to Texas nine times, the last time just last week.
“He seems to think that there’s no sign of disease at this point,” Garrett said. “The spots in my lungs seem like it’s infection or inflammation… He thinks it’s not cancer because they didn’t grow after being off of chemo for six weeks.”
The healing process has been a tough time for all of Garrett’s family. He dad, Dennis French, said he’s laid awake crying a lot this past year.
“If we had hadn’t got her to MD Anderson she’d be dead by now,” he said.

At Home
When Garrett discovered she had a sarcoma and that no one in the area knew much about or how to treat she decided she had to take her fate into her own hands.
“Had I gave up this time last year it would have been a totally different story,” Garrett said. “It would have continued to spread and grow.”
“We didn’t get a referral, we did it all ourselves,” Penny’s husband, Todd Garrett, added.
Olivia French said the entire process has been scary.
“It’s taken a whole horde of people to fight it,” she said. “It definitely takes a whole community of people to help you get through it, because it is horrific.”
She said people helped her sister with airfare, hotel stays and food.
Garrett said it’s hard to believe she hasn’t worked in a year. She said she’s still consumed with it. It’s all she thinks about all the time.
“It seems like I’ve been fighting this battle a long time,” she said. “It’s become a new life.”
She said she spent more time with her kids in the last year than she did while she was working. She also said she had to hide a lot of her disease from her kids.
They never knew it got as bad as it was and now they don’t know that she might not have cancer.
“My cancer may come back,” she said. “It’s hard to say I’m cancer free and I’m going to live a long life because I still may not.”
Every time she gets an ache or pain now she thinks it’s back.
Garrett said she’s tried to get credit cards paid off in case she does passes away and she has a life insurance policy that will help pay for the mortgage, she said.
“The bigger thing is thinking about my kids and leaving them behind without a mother,” Garrett said. “Madison is 10 years old and in the next few years she’s really going to need her mother.”
Garrett said she’s planning on making books for her children to have when they graduate, get married and have children so she can share her thoughts about these milestones and give them advice.
But until then she’s not going down without a fight.
“You don’t have to take that diagnosis that you need a miracle and go home and give up,” she said. “I think as a patient you have to sometimes be an advocate for yourself and find the help you need.”
For more information visit http://www.CreeperTrailRideForACure.com.
To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call (276) 628-7101.