Fort Lauderdale was just about as far from the Pacific Northwest as Jennifer Patzold could get while still living in the United States. After exiting a turbulent relationship, that’s just what she wanted. A fresh start with a new job in sunny southern environs might have been just what the doctor ordered. As long as that doctor didn’t know about the ticking time bomb she harbored in her lithe body.
The day Jennifer landed in her new hometown and closed on the purchase of her house, Hurricane Katrina arrived as well. By the time she wrapped her fingers around her new set of house keys, the power was already out at the home she’d just bought. Despite this ominous welcome, Jennifer carried on, buoyantly settling into to her unfamiliar Floridian community and newfangled job as chief information officer for a thriving simple cremation corporation.
Jennifer as a volunteer firefighter
Four months later, Jennifer sat, irritated and impatient, in the emergency room of a crowded hospital waiting for another intravenous bag of antibiotics that her doctor insisted she receive. As an emergency medical technician and volunteer firefighter, Jennifer knew her way around IV’s and badgered her physician to let her take the IV bag home to dispense herself. He refused and instead beseeched her to go to the hospital for a CT Scan to rule out a kidney stone that might explain the pesky persistence of her unresolved urinary tract infection.
So she sat, running through to do lists, Christmas plans, and eager thoughts of a festive wedding she was scheduled to attend in Las Vegas at the end of the week. She joked with the mellow scan technician whose easy banter and relaxed demeanor helped ease her vexation.
With an abrupt break from his seemingly unflappable calm, the technician suddenly rushed into the room. His pace was hurried and nervous. Things started happening fast and the sudden chaos was palpable, as Jennifer lay alarmed and disconcertingly uninformed on the table. All of the sudden, she felt “like a grenade that someone had taken the pin out of.”
Finally, a doctor came in and explained that she had an impossibly large mass in her abdomen. “How large?”, she logically asked. When the physician extended his hands in response to her question, Jennifer reeled to make sense of the more than 12 inches between his palms.
"She had been a twin in her mother’s womb but now the twin turned tumor was so large it threatened to rupture and take her life."
“It can’t be that big.. I’m not that big,” she reasoned. At five foot seven and a lean 125 pounds, Jennifer didn’t look like someone who could accommodate an undetected enlarged basketball in her belly. Yet, apparently she had. The massive teratoma discovered in her belly had been with her since birth. It seems that she had been a twin in her mother’s womb. The identical sibling with whom she’d shared a placenta had perished along their gestational journey and been absorbed into Jennifer’s growing body. Now, the twin turned tumor was so large it threatened to rupture and take her life.
Jennifer was septic and needed an immediate transfusion and emergency surgery that would likely claim all organs touching the tumor. This athletic 34 year old was left to ponder life without a bladder, lower intestine, and all reproductive organs as the surgeon rushed to book an operating room. “Am I going to be ok.. am I going to die?” Jennifer asked in hopes of some cliché comfort. Instead, the doctor bluntly replied that her situation was “grave and was not going to be easy.” Jennifer quickly called her mom who scrambled to catch the first plane headed east.
In the meantime, another surgeon was consulted who thankfully endeavored to find a way to save Jennifer’s life while preserving most of her organs. They agreed to wait until morning to operate after Jennifer’s mother arrived. She sat up all night alone in the hospital until the sun came up. She remembers that fateful sunrise so vividly as she wondered if it would be her last.
That morning, the surgeons operated and Jennifer was relieved of her strange twin, now a watermelon sized mass replete with teeth and hair. Miraculously and skillfully, the surgeon was able to leave all but part of one of Jennifer’s ovaries intact.
For the good part of the next year, Jennifer felt as if her organs were sloshing around. “My body had a hard time adjusting to not having a big tumor…for 34 years, my homeostasis was having a gigantic tumor.”
“Once I stopped thinking about it as disgusting and freakish thing, I felt at peace with it,” say Jennifer who is participating in womb twin research and is working on turning her story into chapter for an upcoming book about womb twins.
Two years later, she is nearly healed physically and back to most of her usual adventures like scuba diving, traveling, waterskiing, and the occasional motorcycle ride. Soon, she’ll be fit enough to take the agility test required for her to be reinstated as a volunteer firefighter. The spiritual and emotional healing is more of a work in progress. “This experience was so out of my control, I became very small and humble and there was no fooling around. It really kicks in the spiritual side of things… At some point, I was sharing a placenta with my twin and I watched her die before I was born.”
When asked how this experience has changed her life, Jennifer thinks for a moment before answering that it hasn’t changed her life as much as it has helped her understand herself better. “It explained so much about my personality…. My fear of loss and abandonment, the feeling that something was missing, and my intense drive to save people…it all makes a lot more sense now,” she clarifies. Jennifer says that before the massive discovery, she planned every detail of her life. Now, she finds herself more open, present, and able to accept less control over her future. Nearly a fatal surprise, Jennifer’s enormous tumor brought gifts of subtle enlightenment.
Thank you Jennifer, for sharing your Story with us!
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© 2008 by Jenoa Briar-Bonpane and Story of My Life®