When Stephanie first began getting headaches in November 2016, she wasn’t terribly worried because they “came and went,” she says.
By January, they became more constant with no relief from the pain, so she decided to go to her doctor to get checked out.
When the diagnosis came on Feb. 16, it was worse than anything she could have imagined. She had a grade 4 glioblastoma — which is the most aggressive, deadly brain tumor there is — on her brain stem. Without removal and treatment, patients typically die within a few months, experts say. Even with treatment, without removal the average survival rate is 15 months, doctors told her.
“The doctor said because of the location, they weren’t willing to operate; it was too risky,” Stephanie, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her family’s privacy, tells PEOPLE. “They decided to leave it and press forward with radiation and chemotherapy with hope for the best.”
She and her husband Michael consulted three other top neurosurgeons in the country who also refused to try to remove it, she says.
“I was a young mom and wife and I really felt like they gave me a death sentence,” she says. “Everything we’d read about glioblastomas said you need surgery to remove it if you stand a chance.”
Devastated, Stephanie started a blog, mainly to update her friends and family but also to capture everything she was feeling.
“So I have the worst kind of cancer in the worst place possible,” Stephanie wrote on Feb. 18. “Hearing statistically I have 15 months to live is just heartbreaking. I’m only 27 years old, I have a beautiful 2-year-old daughter and I love my husband more than anything on this earth. How could this be happening!?”
Miraculously, that blog somehow found its way to Dr. Michael Sughrue, a neurosurgeon at OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City who specializes in removing brain tumors other doctors say are inoperable. He immediately posted a comment.
“I wrote, ‘Hey, I’m a neurosurgeon. I specialize in very difficult brain tumors. Not all of these things are really inoperable. Why don’t you show me your films and I can see if I can do something to help you,’ ” Sughrue, 38, tells PEOPLE. “Within five minutes she emailed me and said, ‘What do I need to do?’ “
She sent him the MRIs of her tumor. After reviewing them he told her he thought he could help her.
“I said, ‘I can get at least most of this out without too much risk but here’s what the risks are,’ ” he says.
Stephanie and her husband, who were on their way to Disney World in Orlando, were floored by his reaction.
“He said, ‘Honestly, I thought it would be much worse than what you showed me,’ ” says Stephanie. “I thought he was going to tell us the same thing the other doctors did. I really didn’t think he’d tell us he could do it.”
She and Michael tabled the discussion for the day so they could enjoy their daughter’s first trip to Disney and decided to talk about it that night.
“I was terrified,” she says. “Why were all these other doctors saying, ‘No, it’s not worth the risk’ and he’s saying, ‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be?’ “
They decided to fly out to at least hear what he had to say.
“We said, ‘This is just too crazy.’ We’ve been praying about this and all of a sudden my blog finds its way to a neurosurgeon a thousand miles away that says it’s not that bad,” she says. “We decided we’d fly out there and if he’s crazy we’ll just come home. So we flew out there and hoped we didn’t waste the money on plane tickets.”
By week’s end, she was being operated on.
“I was scared to do the surgery but I was scared not to,” she says. “From everything we’d read, people don’t survive a glioblastoma if they don’t take it out. I felt like my chances were greater having had the surgery.”
After a two-and-a-half hour operation on Feb. 24 (Michael’s 29th birthday), Dr. Sughrue was able to remove about 90 to 95 percent of the tumor and Stephanie is now considered cancer free, he says. Six days after her operation, Stephanie started a regimen of five days a week of radiation for a month and seven days a week of chemotherapy.
She was able to come home to Florida on April 15, the night before Easter.
“It’s been two months since my surgery and I feel really great,” she says. “We just feel so much more hopeful now. I know even with having the surgery my chances aren’t great, but I have to believe this is going to be okay because if I believe any other way there’s just no point.”
After a four-week break, Stephanie will start taking a pill form of chemotherapy one week a month and get another MRI in the next two or three months.
It’s hard for Stephanie to put into words how grateful she is to Sughrue.
“He gave me a chance when no one else would,” she says. “I’m so thankful he was willing to reach out to a random person on a blog and look at my scans without me having to fly out there. I don’t think a lot of doctors would do that.”
While she has no idea what her future holds, for now she’s just grateful to be alive.
“I’m just trying to take every day as the gift that it is,” she says. “I feel like I’m trying to make everything a moment in my life. You never think something like this is going to happen to you. Who goes to a doctor for a headache and finds out they have a grade 4 brain cancer? I’m happy to be here and I’m happy to be at home.”
And she has advice for others who are in her situation.
“People need to know that inoperable doesn’t necessarily mean inoperable,” she says.
In fact, Dr. Sughrue says about 50 people with similar dire prognoses have contacted him after reading stories about how he helped Stephanie. He’s evaluating their cases.
The reason he can help people like Stephanie when other surgeons won’t is due to a personal decision he made in early 2012, shortly after arriving at OU Medicine and starting his professional career. Most surgeons won’t try to remove tumors like Stephanie’s because it is risky, not because it’s impossible, he says.
He decided to talk to his patients and get their thoughts.
“Most people were willing to take some risk to get more time with their families,” he says. “As doctors, we’re trained to think of things in terms of science and statistics. So I came to the conclusion that patients view it very differently. They view it as a battle for their lives. I just said, ‘I’m going to get on that team.’ That team makes more sense to me. . . than the team of trying to sit down and infinitely split hairs.”
Since then he’s removed about 50 or 60 “inoperable” brain tumors, he says.
“Everyone who comes to my door, I’m going to do what I can for them,” he says. “I want to be able to look in their eyes and say I did everything I could to keep them alive.”
LOOKING BACK:
“It was a miracle for how everything transpired and how he found us, how we connected because as soon as I sent him my scans, four days later I was on the operating table.”
The surgery was successful and Jones said she is ‘doing great.’
She is now sharing her story with even more people as a way to encourage them to never give up.
“It’s so important that you never lose hope because when you lose hope that’s when the fear creeps in. You can’t survive on fear.” Unfortunately on October 6 2017 Stephanie lost her battle with this deadly type of cancer.
Often over looked in source energy!!!
How to Heal all Diseases with Source Energy …
Amy’s Healing Story
In a nutshell!!!
8+ years of chronic Lyme disease, Epstein Barr Virus, inflammation, nerve damage and other health failures = only completely resolved with no recurrent symptoms once I finally went back to balance my energy system and address/release the emotional component of my illnesses.
15+ years of intensely painful menstrual problems (endometriosis, fibroids, polyps) accompanying chronic fatigue symptoms + 5 surgeries + every medical and alternative therapy I could find = only resolved after using energy therapy techniques. No drugs, no supplements, no special diets.
How it started:
After 8 years suffering with Chronic Lyme disease and other associated health failures, I recovered largely thanks to an experimental embryonic stem cell treatment in India. However, the endometriosis, fibroids, polyps and intensely painful menstruation that I had suffered for 15 years, became dramatically worse. I began to question why this too, didn’t heal with such radical treatment. And not only didn’t it heal, but it got worse.
Then, years after my stem cell transplant, I start to see the emergence of some troubling symptoms — very similar to the ones I originally experienced. All my Lyme tests were also negative, but it was later confirmed that chronic Epstein Barr Virus, various food allergies and other conditions that I had been free of for so long, were back. This meant, once again, my immune system was impaired. I was scared to death that I would end up where I once was, in a downward spiral of chronic pain.
So, I started to look more deeply at my health conditions than I ever had before….
I obsessively researched alternative ways to get my debilitating menstrual issues (pain, heavy bleeding and fatigue) under control. I tried everything from a world renowned Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor to herbs to special diets and supplements. After endless therapies with the best specialists and 5 failed surgeries, I became determined to find out what was really causing this.
I knew that whatever was causing my body to be so imbalanced, this could manifest, was likely why I couldn’t stay well from all of my other health challenges. The immune system, when it’s strong, is the gatekeeper for disease. Something was wrong at a fundamental level — and it had to be somewhere I hadn’t looked deeply enough at yet.
“If treating the body alone doesn’t resolve the challenge, then the body alone must not be what created it.” – Me
What contributes to one person manifesting a disease or post traumatic reaction to an event, while another person remains healthy? What will help ignite the body’s own mechanism for healing after the onset of injury or illness?
I began to explore the concept of energy, and how the body actually has its own energy system. If it becomes imbalanced, symptoms of any kind can arise.
What I found out
After working with myself first and then many others, I believe wholeheartedly that unprocessed emotions, unresolved trauma and damaging belief systems (ones we don’t even recognize we have!) are the biggest contributors to why we suffer with symptoms. In many ways, the way in which we experience our lives from an emotional standpoint is a blueprint for how it unfolds.
Not only do stored energies cause us to experience intense emotional reactions like fear, excessive worry, and sadness; but also, they have a huge impact on our immune systems, which affect our physical bodies. By releasing these emotions, we also free ourselves from negative emotional patterns, and employ our immune system’s full healing capabilities.
I believe because the trapped emotional energy I was storing in my body was never addressed, the stem cell transplant forced the physical repair of some of my body; but the underlining emotional energy was still there. . . .and just began to re-manifest in different ways. While I grew so much spiritually and emotionally in India, I eventually fell back into some of my old unhealthy patterns of living and thinking when I returned.
Although disease is often viewed as a negative experience, I do believe that it is a vessel to help us clear out from our lives that which no longer serves us. It’s the sometimes-hard-to-see-the silver lining to suffering. And while I had many ups and downs in my process of healing, I see now with clarity, there was purpose to it all.
Where I am now
After learning to move energy in my body and addressing emotional links to my symptoms, I found wellness again. And I know in my heart, it is for good. The feeling that accompanied my return to full health is nothing like I’ve ever felt before — like I’ve truly healed to my core.
I addressed issues like:
- Being extremely fearful of things like germs, not being in control, and the future — which really translated to deep fear about not being safe in the world
- Being scared to be healthy (yes, I really had that fear and I believe the majority of ill people have it in them somewhere too)
- Unprocessed grief, resentment and other issues
- The emotional patterns I now find to be prominent in those with chronic Lyme disease.
- Why I was still holding on to my illness (finding the upside to my illness and discovering limiting beliefs)
I now live a normal life without the interference of menstrual issues. The worrisome symptoms I started to experience once again years after my treatment in India completely reversed. I am healthier and happier now than I have ever been in my entire life.
I truly feel this is because I went back and healed all the parts of myself that were also struggling – not just my physical body. I re-established a foundation for myself in this world – one without the fears I had carried for so long. In turn, I believe I sent strong messages to my whole being that it was safe to relax…and that released my immune system from so much of the stress it was burdened by.
I put myself in a space of allowing my complete healing. 🙂
