Brain cancer patient takes life one day at a time
By Shawn Hayward, The Neuro
Michelle Doré has a message for anyone who starts noticing changes in mood or temperament:
“Even if they don’t have physical changes, they must contact their doctor,” she says. “First a general doctor, to get a reference to a neurologist for a total evaluation.”
Doré’s family were the first to notice something wasn’t right with her. She began to become apathetic and unbalanced, to the point where her mother thought she was drunk.
Eventually Doré stopped answering her phone or answering the door. Her sister called a friend who went see Doré. When she did not answer the door, he was so worried that he threatened to call the police if she didn’t let him in.
“I thought, ‘What’s his problem?’ So I opened the door and I was laughing. He called the ambulance and they brought me at the hospital and did a few tests. Then they sent me to another hospital for more tests. There I had an MRI and they found that I had a big tumour on the right side, frontal lobe.”
Doré had surgery to remove to tumour, but she was still not herself. They did more tests to reveal she had another tumour, this one on the left side of her brain.
“I told my family that I didn’t want to be treated if I have cancer,” she says. “I have a lot of family members and friends who had very weird reactions to the treatments and to the chemotherapy, to the radiotherapy, to the protocols, to everything.”
But then her daughter convinced her to keep fighting; she was getting married that July, and wanted her mother to be there.
“I said OK. I went to radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery here in Montreal. They then sent me to a re-adaptation centre. I was there for a few weeks. Suddenly I started to have big headaches. They found out that I had fluid building in my brain.”
That meant yet another surgery to remove the fluid, but Doré was there for her daughter’s wedding. The treatment has bought her a few more years.
Doré says she is grateful for the extra time she has received under the care of Dr. Scott Owen and Dr. Kevin Petrecca at The Neuro.
“I’m not thinking about three or four years,” she says. “I’m thinking about today. Next week if possible, but this week. Let’s concentrate on this week. Next week we will see.”
May 29, 2019