A positive attitude goes a long way and a little luck doesn’t hurt either.
Being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer doesn’t happen every day. But that is exactly what happened to Prince George resident Zebun Noorani at the beginning of 2021.
The day after getting a temporary tooth implant Noorani got really ill, experiencing searing pain in her stomach and vomiting repeatedly.
“I said I didn’t want to go to the doctor, I would be OK,” Noorani said.
“Tuesday morning I told her we were going to the hospital,” Aliya Jackson, Noorani’s daughter who she lives with, said. “She couldn’t eat, her skin had gone a little yellow – it was instantaneously bizarre symptoms.”
At the hospital, tests found a mass between her pancreatic duct and bile duct. The pressure from the mass was interfering with her bile duct function which was causing the searing gut pain and vomiting. A stent surgically placed in her bile duct alleviated the problem.
Further tests over a couple of weeks told a terrible tale of cancer cell numbers doubling at an alarming rate. The action plan was chemo first, surgery (whipple, a massively invasive procedure) second, with follow up chemo as the final round of combat.
The first part of the battle included 12 rounds of chemotherapy, once a week, three weeks on, one week break, three weeks on and so on.
“During those 12 rounds of chemo Mom lost her hair and that’s when it hit us that she was really sick,” Jackson said. “We thought about a wig but Mom said she was OK with scarves and she looked adorable in the cute little scarves she wore. She is always dressed to the nines – sick or not.”
Noorani usually weighs 125 pounds and through the worst of the treatment went down to a mere 98 pounds.
In the middle of treatment, Noorani experienced heartbreak of another kind. Noorani kept in touch with a friend she had known for more than 50 years and during one of their weekly telephone conversations she got some bad news.
“Every Sunday she would call me and we’d chat about our lives,” Noorani said. “One day she told me she was not feeling well and the pain in her stomach was so bad she could only eat half an egg and a half piece of toast at a time.”
Those symptoms were all too familiar to Noorani.
“I told her to go to the doctor right away.”
Some time passed and the next call came from Noorani’s friend’s daughter, telling her that her mom was taken into palliative care because she had waited too long and passed away from pancreatic cancer not long afterward, she recalled.
“Please don’t wait to go to the doctor,” Noorani said. “If you don’t feel well go get help. There is nothing that should stop you from getting the help you need.”
The next step after chemotherapy for Noorani was the whipple procedure, which took place in July and in a six-hour surgery experts removed a large portion of Noorani’s pancreas, repositioned her bile duct and pancreatic duct and removed 19 lymph nodes.
“It was brutal,” Noorani said.
“I call her the beast because she is such a tough cookie,” Jackson said about her mom. “We are so blessed here. We have some exceptionally skilled healthcare workers here.”
Jackson and husband Trevor, along with Noorani moved from Vancouver to Prince George in 2017. Jackson couldn’t help make a comparison of the care and attention Noorani received here where she said healthcare workers got to know her mom and her family and it seemed to make all the difference.
“Nurses and doctors here were all just amazing and they all really cared about my mom,” Jackson said.
Because one of the 19 lymph nodes that had been removed during the whipple procedure was deemed ‘problematic’ the surgery was followed up by another 12 rounds of chemotherapy but this time it wasn’t so intense.
“It was a bit daunting because you’re finished with the surgery and you think you’re all done, right?” Jackson said. “And it was hard. That’s when the emotions got high too because you think you’re at the end.”
But you’re not.
“And COVID didn’t help – I am a person who used to work out every day,” Noorani explained. “And I couldn’t get out and it was difficult – emotionally, mentally, physically.”
The last rounds of chemo treatment took place every second week and, after some adjustments, to the medication it was tolerable..
Throughout the whole process Noorani, who Jackson said is a very service-minded, always giving back kind of person, decided she needed to gift those at the cancer clinic.
Noorani made 50 bean bags to gift to the staff at the cancer clinic at Christmas time and she brought them treats so often staff told her she could come without making them cookies every time she came for treatment.
“She always thinks about everybody else first,” Jackson said.
“People here are so nice,” Noorani said. “During this experience, everyone in the hospital, the cancer clinic was so wonderful, it makes me cry to think about it – I was part of their family. And each person showed up every day to care for the sick and it must be so hard for them emotionally – not just physically – to deal with that every day.”
Tradition says that once a person has completed their cancer treatment they ring the bell in the foyer.
Staff asked Noorani to ring the bell on a Friday so that all of them could witness healthcare at its best – the bell rung by a cancer-free patient.
To applause and cheers, Noorani rang that bell so hard she almost knocked it right off its moorings.
Before the diagnosis, Noorani, who has diabetes, was very active spending a couple of hours a day exercising in some form or another, eating well and always being mindful to keep a positive attitude because that’s always been her way of getting through life.
That positive attitude served her well before she was diagnosed with cancer, it served her well through treatment and now looking at it from the other side, it still serves her well.
At 74 years old, Noorani knows she’s going to have a beautiful rest of her life, she said with a smile.
BC Cancer is reminding British Columbians that Cancer Doesn’t Wait, and now is the time to get back into the screening habit.
Due to the pandemic, some British Columbians may be overdue for screening as they may have delayed their appointment out of precaution. Screening resumed early in the pandemic, so now is the time to get checked.
Learn more by visiting www.cancerdoesntwait.ca.
Click here for more information about breast cancer screening.
Click here for more information on colon cancer screening.
