My Long, Long Journey with Glioblastoma
Carmen Rice
by Randy R. Harris
It was on a seemingly innocent, normal Saturday afternoon, having a routine nothing-out-of-the-ordinary lunch with my husband when my life was turned upside-down. April 17, 2004, I had a Grand Mal seizure. Three days later I was diagnosed with a brain tumor and two days after that, I had my first brain surgery. Seizure to surgery in six days. It was quite a whirlwind followed by a very slow drawn out month waiting for the biopsy report. When it finally arrived, it was the worst news possible: Grade 4 Glioblastoma multiforme. Glioblastoma (GBM) is aggressive, incurable, and grows fast.
I was in shock, my thoughts scattered in a thousand directions, tears rolling down.
“But…” the doctor went on. “It was very small and the location would be good for radiation and with chemotherapy, I think there is a chance that we could prolong your life.”
I looked up and felt a sliver of hope flutter through me like a tiny butterfly.
“So, you’ll have to tell me what you want to…”
“Yes!” I said before he could finish. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
This vicious, uninvited, unwanted, evil invader was not going to beat me. I wasn’t sure how exactly, but I was not going down without a fight!
The odds weren’t good, but I never believed in odds anyway.
If there was anything they wanted me to try, I would try it.
If there was anywhere they wanted me to go, I would go.
If there was anything they wanted me to do, I would do it.
It became my mission, my mantra: I would beat this thing.
I finished that long day with a simple prayer, “God, I need you more than ever. Be with me as I go through this journey.” It’s a prayer I would say many times before this thing was through, and one God always answered in the affirmative.
I woke up the next morning and began a fight which would include months of radiation followed by years of chemotherapy. In those coming years, I would be prodded, stabbed, poked, sliced, stapled, diced and drilled! I would be tied down, dyed and written on and wiped clean. I would be told I had six months to live. I would be told I had six weeks to live. My vitals would be charted and cross-checked and double-checked. My “bathroom activities” made public. My head would be shaved. I would lose weight, gain weight and get bloated. I lost the ability to walk and feed myself and have filled more than my share of vomit bags. I would have tubes put in me and I would be put in tubes. I would be told to stand here, stand there, not move, move, turn this way, turn that way, turn back the other way, sit down, lay down, turn over and on and on and on.
It is what cancer patients do, a regular banquet of delightful experiences, a few of which either didn’t hurt or weren’t completely humiliating.
But through it all, I kept fighting. I had my last chemotherapy treatment in 2011. That’s when they began to call me “The Miracle.”
I have a Glioblastoma tumor and yet here I am, still standing, 21 one years later.
Cancer has taken some things away from me, but it has also given me many precious things as well. It has taught me courage and patience. It has taught me to be more open to receiving help from other people. It has exposed the love that people have for me, and it has forced me to express love back to them in ways I never would have otherwise. Cancer tore down and rebuilt my faith in God into something I could not have imagined twenty-one years ago. It has taught me so much about trusting God, even when everything seemingly was going wrong. These and many other things are precious to me because they came at such a high price of pain, sorrow, trials, and actual blood, sweat, and tears.
As of today (Summer 2025), I now have had more than three dozen MRIs since my second brain surgery in 2008, hearing my favorite words, “no new growth” never gets old. Each time, I still call my family and friends with the good news. My goal in writing my story was to give cancer patients hope. I love speaking whenever I am able: to cancer support groups, church groups, ladies’ luncheons and especially for the National Foundation for Cancer Research in Washington D.C. and the American Cancer Society. These days I’d like to say I’m living a regular normal life, which was always my goal. I can do almost everything I did before cancer, except: drive a car, dye my hair and keep track of murder mysteries.
Excerpts adapted from the book, “They Call Me the Miracle, The Carmen Rice Story” by Randy R. Harris, published by Emerald House (2021).
