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    My Butterfly Cancer
    My Butterfly Cancer
    My Butterfly Cancer
    Ebook83 pages1 hour

    My Butterfly Cancer

    By Markie Madden

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Cancer. It's one of the things we most dread to hear about ourselves or a family member. Many people will think it's the end of the line for them.

    Markie tells the story of her battle with leukemia (specifically AML), and the struggles that she and her family experienced during this tragic time.
    Find out how the butterfly effect and her battle with cancer led her to become an independently-published author, bringing her a sense of fulfillment she thought had been lost forever.

    Metamorph Publishing will donate 20% of the sales from this title to cancer charities.

    My Butterfly Cancer is the shockingly harsh and honest look into a year in the life of a cancer patient. Walk with her as she takes the grueling trip from diagnosis to remission and beyond, to becoming an independently-published author.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMetamorph Publishing
    Release dateNov 25, 2014
    ISBN9781311550873
    My Butterfly Cancer
    Author

    Markie Madden

    Markie Madden, born Marguerite Malone on August 19, 1975 in Midland, Texas, is the author of Once Upon a Western Way, Keeping a Backyard Horse, and My Butterfly Cancer. She grew up in Flushing, Michigan, where she began to write stories when she was a teenager. She married in 1994 and now has 2 teenage daughters. She has 3 rescue dogs and a horse whom she enjoys spending time with. She is also a cancer survivor, battling leukemia (AML) in 2013-2014. She now resides in a small country town in Missouri, where she continues to write. She hopes that her newest book, Keeping a Backyard Horse, will help prevent accidental mistreatment of horses, and help educate horse owners in taking care of their horse even on a budget. She raised and trained her horse Athena. In 2014, she founded Metamorph Publishing as a way to self-publish her books, and she's now working with other indie authors as well. Her three books Once Upon a Western Way, Keeping a Backyard Horse, and My Butterfly Cancer are all available in print and for e-readers, and My Butterfly Cancer is also out in audiobook format. She can also be found on GoodReads, Scribophile, Shelfari, and Wattpad, as well as many other social media such as Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more.

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      Book preview

      My Butterfly Cancer - Markie Madden

      My Butterfly Cancer

      Markie Madden

      Third Edition

      Copyright © 2014 by Metamorph Publishing and Markie Madden

      All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means- electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other-except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles--without the express permission of the author or publisher.

      Kindle ASIN: B00NGQNQXI

      Smashwords ISBN 978-1311550873

      Print ISBN 978-1502320995

      Published by Metamorph Publishing

      Smashwords Edition License Notes:

      This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords and leave a review.

      Dedicated to Sam White and his wonderful family, who gave me the courage to keep up the fight. May he rest in peace. Also, to Denise (Mercer) Blackwell, whose tiny act of kindness created an out-of-control snowball (bet you had NO idea what you were starting!); to all the staff at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Siteman Cancer Center; and to my entire family, who fought beside me every step of the way! I love you all!

      Author’s Note

      This is the third edition of this book. I’m now reproducing it with some additions, using some very sophisticated writing software called Scrivener. Though it took a while, and some outside help, to learn to use this, as it’s vastly different than Microsoft Word, I think it’s a brilliant software and even has settings to help someone like me whose memory isn’t so good any longer.

      So, with these additions in mind, I will use a bold face print when I talk about something that’s new, that wasn’t in the first story, because I’d love to talk a bit more about this new software and the kinds of hardships and frustrations I could have saved myself if I’d only learned about it a few months earlier! And I’m going to talk about the walk into the world of audiobooks as well, something I hadn’t known about or attempted before this book was last printed.

      This new software will help me to clean up some cosmetic issues that I’ve dealt with over the past several months. Remember, I’m just post-chemotherapy, so A) I’m learning a new laptop and operating system (going from Windows 7 to Windows 8), B) learning a new word processing software (my latest up-to-date Microsoft Office pack was Office 2007!), and C) learning yet another word processing software.

      In this I’d like to take a moment to thank fellow author and colleague Vinny O’Hare, head of Facebook’s Awesome Gang (online), and fellow indie author Karen Prince for her book Scrivener Essentials for Windows (she wrote one for Mac users too), for her generosity in gifting me her book in PDF format, a book that I downloaded onto my phone so I’d always have a reference. Once I’ve finished converting my existing book files, I’ll be gifting her in return.

      B.C. (Before Cancer)

      June 27, 2013 was a day in my life that I’ll never forget. I’ll tell you more about that day in a minute, but first I’d like to tell you a little bit about who I was up until that day. I was born August 19, 1975 in Midland, Texas. I grew up in the small town of Flushing, Michigan, where I eventually graduated high school. I met my husband, married, and started a family.

      We moved around quite a bit, going where we could get jobs, eventually settling in a very small country town in southeast Missouri. I was 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighed in at only 132 pounds (I’ve always been skinny), and was in fairly good shape. I was a 37 year old wife and mother of two teenage daughters, Tasha and Ally. I had four dogs, a yellow lab/husky mix named Rain, a Great Dane/Mastiff mix named Morgan, a miniature Boxer (I think Boxer/Jack Russell terrier) named Pepper, and a golden retriever named Jody. All were rescue dogs. I also had a horse named Athena (trained by yours truly), and I worked full time as a manager in an auto parts store in the small Missouri town near my home. Medically, I had a condition called fibromyalgia, which had caused me a lot of problems in the past but was currently under control with medication. I’d had a few surgeries, had a touch of arthritis from half a lifetime of working jobs on my feet, but rarely ever got sick except maybe with the flu once in a while or a touch of hay fever.

      My husband, Jay, worked a job in a factory at the time, and while we weren’t even middle-class (well, maybe very low middle-class around here), we were making do even if it was paycheck to paycheck. We didn’t have the newest cars, or the biggest house, but they were sufficient. Things weren’t always perfect, but as a family, we were happy.

      I was your average type ‘A’ personality: always wanting to keep busy, striving to be the best I could be at work and at home. I worked hard at any job I did, usually rising quickly through promotion. Sometimes I played hard too; one of my favorite things to do when I wasn’t working was to ride or groom my horse, and I was learning how to trim her hooves myself, a very physically demanding task.

      Christmas week of 2012, however, I came down with a very rare disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome, an auto-immune disease where the body’s immune system attacks the lining surrounding the nerves. This effect is sort of

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