When Pat Myers was told by doctors she had a grapefruit-sized tumor on the back of her brain, she chose faith over fear.
But it didn’t make her journey with cancer, which included weekly trips to Atlanta, Georgia, for treatment, easy. Add to that a global pandemic and a lot of people would have been ready to throw in the towel.
But not Myers, who gets up every morning and faces the day with a smile and a positive outlook.
That’s because with God, her family and friends by her side, she knows things will work out somehow, she said.
Before her diagnosis, Myers, 63, was an administrative assistant in the main office at Seymour High School. It’s a job she’s ready to get back to, she said.
And she will. But right now, she still is experiencing some lingering vision problems.
Unlike many types of cancer, Myers was unable to feel the tumor growing inside her head even though it was so large. There was no telltale lump or knot she could touch.
The only symptom was the constant headaches, she said.
“I’ve had really, really bad headaches for a long time,” she said. “I would tell my husband that it feels like my head is in a vice grip and someone is just smashing the tar out of it.”
Myers would go to the doctor complaining her head hurt, always in the same place, but would never get a reason why.
Her daughter, Tiffany Rotert, who works in the operating room at Schneck Medical Center, began to notice her mom was having trouble remembering things.
“I just couldn’t think because my head hurt so bad,” Myers said. “I couldn’t stay on top of things.”
Then the tumor began affecting her vision. She went to the eye doctor and complained she was seeing auras, flashes of light and squiggly lines.
That went on for about a year, she said.
She was told she was suffering from migraines, and it was getting worse because of anxiety about the pandemic.
“One doctor wanted to put me on Prozac,” she said.
But her husband wasn’t buying it.
Dennis Myers knew it wasn’t that his wife wasn’t handling the pandemic well. Something was really wrong. Tiffany felt the same way and convinced her mom to go to the doctor again.
“She said, ‘Mom, how do you know you don’t have a tumor or something?’” Pat said.
So she made another appointment through the school’s health clinic.
This time, she told the nurse practitioner she was having trouble sleeping because she couldn’t lay back on her head. The tumor was in both hemispheres of her brain.
That’s when they finally ordered a scan of her head, Pat said.
She had just made it home from Columbus where she had the scan done and received a phone call telling her she had a tumor.
Her daughter stepped up and talked to a neurosurgeon at Schneck. Because of the size of the tumor, they advised her to go see Dr. Troy Payner at Ascension St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis.
“It was the largest rear-facing tumor that he had ever seen,” Pat said. “They were surprised that it hadn’t caused me to have a stroke or a seizure.”
A few days prior to having brain surgery, doctors did an eight-hour embolization procedure where they “shot beads into the tumor because it had so many veins that were feeding it,” she said.
The procedure blocked the veins so she wouldn’t bleed out when they removed the tumor.
During the 20-hour brain surgery Aug. 24, they were able to remove enough of the tumor so it was the size of a ping-pong ball, Pat said.
Payner couldn’t remove all of it because of its location on the brain stem and the optic nerve.
“They wanted to leave cognitive function,” she said. “If they would have gotten it all, I wouldn’t have been able to walk, talk. I wouldn’t have been able to function at all.”
Pat’s family was told they wouldn’t be able to talk to her for two days because that’s how long it would take her to come around from the surgery.
“Within six hours, I woke up,” she said. “They said I would have to go to rehab.”
But she didn’t. She was able to walk and talk on her own, a fact she credits to God.
“Faith over fear. That’s my whole motto,” she said.
After the surgery, her headaches diminished substantially to where they were manageable and she was able to sleep better, she said.
She was first told the tumor was a benign meningioma, a noncancerous tumor.
“We didn’t even know for a week after that it was cancer,” she said.
Pat was diagnosed with hemangiopericytoma, a really rare type of cancer that only affects 1% of the population. Doctors told her the tumor had probably been growing for 15 to 20 years.
The next step was to meet with Dr. Kevin McMullen, a radiation oncologist at Schneck.
“Dr. McMullen said my best option was proton therapy,” Pat said. “It’s a proton radiation where instead of shooting radiation into the whole brain, it’s a beam and they direct it to the exact spot.”
The closest proton therapy treatment centers are in Atlanta, Texas, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and Chicago. McMullen said Atlanta was the best place for her to go because Emory University Hospital had treated her type of tumor before.
She underwent 30 treatments or fractions at the Emory Proton Therapy Center over the course of seven weeks.
The treatments were once daily, except on the weekends. Sometimes, they would be as quick as 20 minutes, while other times, it could last an hour or more, depending on how many others were being treated that day.
During the treatments, she was forced to wear a constricting custom head covering that prevented her from moving her head, making the treatments uncomfortable. She couldn’t feel any pain from the treatment, just hear the machines.
“It was awful,” she said.
But she kept the head covering as a reminder of all she went through to get better.
Different people, including family, friends and co-workers, would take turns driving her down to Atlanta for the week and then driving back home on the weekends.
Having finished her treatments Jan. 13, Myers was given the opportunity to ring the bell at Emory signaling she was done.
Looking back on the whole experience, she feels blessed to have had so much love and support from those around her and the expertise of so many doctors, from her husband to her daughter for helping her set up doctors appointments to her son, Blake, and daughter-in-law, Tabitha, for making freezer meals for her to take to Atlanta.
She also received support from Bob Poynter GM in Seymour, which provided her with reliable transportation for the trips south.
She appreciates the love shown from her work family at SHS and Seymour Community School Corp., especially Sherry Reinhart, Tasha Rieckers, Greg Prange, Steve Nauman and Brandon Harpe, and to all those who donated to a GoFundMe fundraiser and others who signed up for a meal train to provide her and Dennis with meals.
And she thanks people, including from her church family at Immanuel Lutheran Church, for praying for her and her family.
“Without all of these people, this would not have been possible,” she said.
Pat will have to continue getting scans of her head regularly to monitor the residual tumor for growth along with a full body scan annually to make sure it doesn’t spread.
But she doesn’t worry about that.
“I choose faith over fear,” she said.