Read Online Ten Years Later by Hoda Kotb - Free Book Online Page A

the Cheshire cat!” she says with a huge smile. “I just started nodding
     and crying.”
    The frustrating she-sells-seashells moments that Lindsay recalls were actually Nancy
     deciding whether to add the skin graft to Lindsay’s tongue.
    “I had this beautiful young woman who entrusted her speech, and her swallowing, and
     the movement of her face to me, so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have her tongue
     tethered too much, because if I did, I had a couple of other tricks up my sleeve,”
     Nancy says, “so I woke her up.”
    Lindsay says, amazed, “She woke me up in the middle of surgery. She stitched my tongue
     loosely and woke me up. She had the anesthesiologist bring me back and she had me
     sing. That’s when she said, ‘Do you like how you sound? If you like how you sound
     I’m just going to stitch you up.’ There’s a risk with the skin graft that if you put
     too much skin on you’ll sound thick tongued, so she didn’t want to cross that line.”
    Lindsay’s surgery also included the removal of lymph nodes from her neck, where the
     cancer had spread. Approximately forty were taken out to be safe and would be tested
     for cancer. About a third of Lindsay’s tongue was removed, a wedge from the inside
     layer. She’s able to speak well today because the surface area of her tongue is not
     compromised; her tongue is simply thinner, which only slightly affects its mobility.
    In Lindsay’s ideal world, she’d have returned to her New York City apartment after
     the holidays and begun her new job at Jupiter. But a lab report put a perilous snag
     in those plans. It indicatedthat a toxic node may have released some of its cancer into Lindsay’s system. The
     ante was upped; both radiation and chemotherapy were now in play. A newfangled technique
     had been developed that might allow Lindsay to tolerate a second round of radiation.
     She was devastated, now familiar with the rigors of treatment.
    “I remember saying to my mom, ‘Nancy called and said I’m a candidate for radiation,’
     and I said to my mom, ‘I will not do it. It’s too hard.’ So we went the next day to
     talk to the doctor about radiation,” she says. “And when they told me the statistics,
     I was in. What are you going to do? Do you want a ten percent chance of survival or
     fifty percent?”
    It was the end of November 2000, and 2001 was looking bleak. Once the calendar page
     turned, Lindsay would undergo radiation treatments on her neck every morning and every
     night for a month. She would have overlapping chemotherapy treatments once every three
     weeks for three months. But until she healed from surgery, no one could touch her.
     She had eight weeks now to recuperate and to develop an action plan.
    “That’s when I started having doctors’ appointments to learn what was next. What are
     my options, what are the side effects? What do the next few months look like?”
    At twenty-four, Lindsay was now in the second fight for her life. Her hopes and dreams
     were eclipsed by a daily existence of healing and gearing up for the next battle.
    “My day was spent high on pain meds, lying in bed, watching ER and movies. I felt like an old person, where a big day was going to see a doctor,”
     she says, laughing. “And that takes all of your energy. You have to get dressed, go,
     come home, and you’re wiped.”
    Lindsay met with an oncologist to discuss the chemo treatments that would begin in
     February. She was armed with a notebook full of questions and listened as he outlined
     the litany of side effects. She had written down Fertility? but never brought it up since the doctordidn’t include it in the list of potential side effects. She left the appointment
     but was bothered by her assumption that infertility was not a concern. Lindsay made
     a follow-up call to the doctor.
    “And that’s when he said something to the effect of, ‘Yes, there’s up to a ninety
     percent chance you’ll be infertile.’ I