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Ann Seymour was on a business trip to New York and feeling completely normal when a perfect stranger – her hotel roommate, who just happened to be a nurse – told her she looked jaundiced, in fact very jaundiced. At the woman’s insistence, Seymour went to a nearby hospital emergency room, where doctors immediately admitted the 71-year-old with a suspected blocked bile duct.
After two days in the hospital, a battery of tests and no improvement, she knew that something was seriously wrong. She insisted on returning to Maryland to see her own gastroenterologist, who had been treating her since a 1992 bout with colon cancer. The doctors strongly advised her not to fly, so several of her colleagues cancelled their plans, rented a car and drove her back home to Laurel. She scheduled an appointment with her doctor for the very next day.
Additional tests and scans indicated that she had a growth on her pancreas. Her GI specialist recommended that she see a nationally known surgical oncologist at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center (UMGCC), Dr. H. Richard Alexander. She had an appointment to see Dr. Alexander the very next day.
“It didn’t take me long at all to bond with him; I liked him right away. I had checked him out on the Internet and read all about his research at the NIH [National Institutes of Health], prior to his coming to Maryland, so I felt very comfortable with him. You just feel confident that what he says is the right thing based on his experience,” she says.
Dr. Alexander recommended surgery to remove the mass on her pancreas. "He told me that since I was in reasonably good health and due to the size and location of the tumor on my pancreas, that I was a good candidate for the Whipple procedure. I had never even heard of a Whipple. But he explained everything to me. He laid out all my options, all the risks, and what the surgery and the recovery would be like. He was very honest with me. He said, ‘I’m not perfect. I’m only as good as my patients', but I had total confidence in him," she recalls.
Seymour was scheduled to have the Whipple procedure just three days later, on May 13, 2008. “I kiddingly told Dr. Alexander that I would have the surgery under three conditions: that I could go to Las Vegas in July (for a convention that she had been responsible for organizing); that I would lose 15 pounds; and that he would give me a bag of potato chips when it was all over.” (alluding to the dietary restrictions common following pancreas surgery.)
“Well, he never gave me the potato chips,” she jokes, “but I did go to Vegas in July.”
In fact, by July Seymour had recovered sufficiently from surgery that her trip went off as scheduled. When she returned, her daughter met her at the airport and drove her directly to the cancer center for her first radiation treatment.
For this next phase of her treatment, she would be under the care of another member of UMGCC’s Pancreatic Cancer Therapy Program, Dr. William F. Regine. Dr. Regine is professor and chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology and a leader in the field of radiation therapy for pancreatic cancer. He recommended a treatment regimen consisting of 28 days of radiation therapy utilizing the Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) and Image-Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT) capabilities of the state-of-the-art Trilogy system.
“I could have had my radiation treatments much closer to home, but once I met Dr. Regine, there was no question in my mind that I wanted to be here. I was so impressed with him. He clearly has genuine compassion for his patients,” says Seymour.
After completing radiation therapy, she underwent three more cycles of chemotherapy. She was pleasantly surprised that she had no ill effects, with the exception of some tiredness after each treatment. “I attribute that more to getting up so early in the morning than from the medications I was getting,” she says.
Of her experience at the Greenebaum Cancer Center: “It’s like traveling first class. Every single person you interact with is totally focused on the patient they are treating that day.”
She was in the Stoler Pavilion for a chemotherapy infusion treatment on the day the entire staff of the hospital dressed in green T-shirts to celebrate an award the hospital had received [See Leapfrog Group award]. “I was so impressed by that,” she says. “You could just feel the pride and dedication, and I felt honored to be a part of it.”
Now fully recovered from her treatment, 40 pounds lighter and with a new lease on life, Seymour is hoping to connect with other pancreatic cancer survivors for support and mutual sharing. “Some very good things came out of this whole experience for me,” she says. “Now I want an opportunity to give back something and be an example for others, the way I was inspired by the people I met while I was here.”
For more information about the Pancreatic Cancer Therapy Program or any of the other programs or services at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center, please call 1-800-888-8823.
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