Cancer was just the beginning

Before waking up in a hospital bed with a bag attached to her colon and an extra 90 pounds of fluid in her body, the last thing Columbia Falls Relay for Life chairwoman Dina Wood said she remembers is lying on the bathroom floor. She woke up 11 days later after her husband checked her into the hospital.

"I had no idea where I was, no idea what happened," Wood said. "The magnitude of everything didn't hit me until they started explaining it to me."

Wood completed chemotherapy just one week earlier. She said she walked into the bathroom trying to figure out how to make herself feel better when she collapsed on the floor.

What she didn't know was that part of her colon had died and started releasing its contents into her body, poisoning her body from the inside. She said her colon was left with no defense system against infections because of the low blood cell count caused by chemotherapy.

"People think that once treatment is over that's it, but it's really not," she said. "Cancer is just so much farther reaching then six months or a year in chemo."

Wood was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2009, one week after her 36th birthday and a year and a half after her wedding day. From there, things moved quickly. In April, she had a double mastectomy and started chemotherapy.

Chemo ended that August, and she didn't have to endure radiation therapy because the cancer never made it into her lymph nodes. Wood said she felt getting through chemo was relatively easy, but that was before her colon gave out and she landed in the hospital again. And that was when her real fight began.

Fluid was pumped into her body to keep her organs alive while she lay comatose in the hospital bed. The bag they attached to her colon, an ostomy pouch, collected her bodily waste. Drains were attached to different parts of her body to collect the excess fluids that kept her alive.

She awoke bewildered and extremely weak.

"I couldn't even support myself on my walker," she said.

Two and a half weeks later, Wood was relieved to finally make it home. But within six hours, her fever spiked at 103 and she was back at Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

"I was a shell of a person because of my colon," she said. "I couldn't do anything. I couldn't feed myself, I couldn't brush my teeth."

The ensuing seven months were a battle. Between constantly draining excess fluids from her body, fighting infections with antibiotics and enduring persistent fevers, her fighting spirit was almost broken. Wood said if it wasn't for her husband and her family, she's not sure she would have made it.

In December, still stuck in the same situation, her family convinced Wood to fly to Chicago for treatment. The American Cancer Society paid for her trip, and that was when her recovery really started, she said. The ostomy pouch was finally removed in February 2010, and she returned to Columbia Falls to start putting the pieces of her life back together.

Wood lost her job during her illness, a blessing in disguise that pushed her to start her own graphic design business, Sherpa Design. The new job also allows her to spend more time doing the things she really cares about, like getting the word out about Columbia Falls Relay for Life and starting a support group for cancer survivors, Flathead Valley Young(er) Women Surviving Breast Cancer.

"I don't regret anything I went through," she said. "If not, I would probably be running the same race I always ran."

The support Wood got from her husband and her family kept her going and strengthened her resolve. But not everyone with cancer has the same support, she said, and events like Relay for Life can bring the community together and provide those who are struggling with the support they need to beat cancer.

"I hate it when cancer wins," Wood said. "If I can show people through my story that cancer doesn't have to win, then that's something."