© MnM Photography
Audrey and her family during the Christmas holidays.
could think. I wasn’t negative, like whoa is me, but I knew I had to get my life in order… because I had cancer and that meant I was going to die.” The first order of business was to have the tumor removed. “I just wanted to get it out of me!” she exclaims. Audrey did what most of us would do and asked for advice from friends who had dealt with cancer, or were in the medical field. She went with the most often recommended breast surgeon in Savannah to remove her tumor, Dr. Ray Rudolph. “I didn’t want to do anything too radical and I remember what my surgeon told me about my cancer, ‘A lumpectomy or a mastectomy will not have any different outcome.’ What he meant was it is all about the treatment afterwards. “I’ve always believed that with anything, whether it is your health, your finances or how to raise your children, you need to make responsible decisions,” says Audrey. “You should be able to make decisions for yourself and not have to be told what the best decision might be.” Audrey believes in research and she set out to become educated about chemotherapy and radiation, and she knew what she did and did not want. “I went for the appointment at the oncology office. It was jam5 1 R IC H M O N D H I L L R E F L E C T IO N S
packed, I was alone that day and it was scary — chemo packs, oxygen tanks, scarves on heads. This is what I am going to look like in the near future,” she thought to herself. Two hours later, Audrey was feeling like the plan for her care was just a standard protocol. “Cancer should be treated on the individual level and not the same protocol for each patient: cut, radiation, chemo… which seems to be the standard of care. I wasn’t worried about comfort and convenience, but what was going to be best for me. I knew I needed another avenue. I needed to do more research.” Audrey found the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) one night while she lay awake watching 3 a.m. television. “There is something about cancer and not sleeping,” she jokes. “It was as if the commercial itself reconfirmed what I was looking for in a treatment — they talked about treating the whole person and being spiritually healthy to become physically healthy.” This was where she would go for her second opinion. “It amazes me at how everything fell into place from day one. CTCA gathered all of my records, biopsies, mammograms — anything they needed they gathered for me. All I had to do was go to the airport.” R IC H M O N D H I L L R E F L E C T IO N SM AG . C OM 5 1