DaVeeda Young White in front of the banner for her organization dq4qd.com.
“I was up on campus at homecoming and my legs just gave out on me. I hurt; everything hurts,” says DaVeeda Young White, who has been living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) for the last 15 years. “I have to plan in advance before I go anywhere or do anything and then I need to rest and medicate beforehand; afterwards, I’ll be down for about a day or so.”
Before even being diagnosed, the MS was already taking its toll on her. “I was falling and getting dizzy from certain patterns, I couldn’t concentrate on what I was doing. I went to a specialist that said ‘You’re in your 30s, you’re Black, you don’t have that,’ and I said, I’ve been a nurse for 16 years, I know what I have. There’s something neuro going on; I know there is.”
A spinal tap at Northwest Hospital confirmed it. “I have this for the rest of my life; there is no cure for MS. I need someone with me 24 hours.” Because she can’t use the stairs, the bottom floor of her home was turned into a single floor living space. Mornings are the worse for her; “I don’t know what I’m waking up to. I can wake up and not see; I can wake up and not speak; I can wake up and my arms don’t work.”
On Nov. 27, 2012, White was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer. “I didn’t want anybody to know anything until I got back; I told my doctor,‘Don’t call me until Tuesday,’ ” said White, who was concerned about ruining the family trip to New York for her daughter’s 21st birthday. She found a lump on her left breast on a Sunday and, “everything snowballed from there.” That week was a battery of tests. “Everybody came in the room and said, ‘You know, we’re not sure what we’re seeing. We want you to get a biopsy.’” She had a biopsy on Friday and was diagnosed the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. “Everyone cried, but I knew I had to move forward. I didn’t even think about it. I said, ‘we’re going to be a team and get through it; we’ll all do it together.’ “
“I don’t say ‘Why me?’ I’m doing this for the team.”
Table layout for gift baskets.
In December, her family went to the hospital. “We had her doing FaceTime for all the meetings,” she said, pointing to her sister, Melissa. We had a big family meeting at the hospital of my whole team that was going to be helping me through all this. So we met with wonderful doctors of St. Agnes Hospital ; but my doctors were the medical oncologist, the surgeon, the plastic surgeon, the nurse navigators, and the primary care doctors. We had to meet with everybody. Each one came in the room and told us about what they saw and what they were going to do. So it was like an interdisciplinary type of thing; it was wonderful.”
The first week of January 2013, she had the opening for her mastectomy. “I opted to do a double; I wanted them to do both. I didn’t want to go through it again. During the surgery, the surgeon took out the cancer and my plastic surgeon was in there with us, Dr. Owens ; she put in the expanders. So every couple of weeks I would go in and she would inflate them a little bit at a time until she got to this size; then she said she couldn’t stretch my skin anymore. I wanted ‘Dolly Parton.’ “
“I’m taking it all as a health challenge; all wrapped up together because I can’t decipher. I don’t know how to decipher what’s cancer and what’s MS; I just know that something’s wrong.”
White tries to find ways to raise funds for the foundation because, “I want to tell people it’s the little things that mean so much. I want to give people blankets, socks, puzzle books and pens to take with them.”
Part of her healing process has been saying, “I have a health condition that I know about and I’m dealing with and I’m working through. I’m just not sitting down anymore. I’m really being verbal about things.” Speaking it into existence, I’m whole, perfect and complete.”
To donate to her foundation DaVeeda’s Quest for Quality Days, go to www.dq4qd.com
Y3thomas@gmail.com