 1. Introduction: The DiscoveryI recently passed the one-year anniversary of when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Cancer is, unfortunately, common in our society, but it’s scary as heck when it happens to you. I knew I would one day die, but I wasn’t prepared to be face-to-face with that cold, harsh reality. Cancer was something that happened to other people, not to me. But cancer did happen to me. “I'm sorry to say so but, sadly, it's true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.” ~ Dr. Seuss Who am I? I’m just a normal person from Idaho. I’m not a celebrity or someone newsworthy. I’m just me. When I was diagnosed, I heeded the doctor’s advice and didn’t scour the internet for information. There’s a lot of information out there, and not much of it is very helpful. I was confused and scared, but trust me when I tell you, social media is not the place to find comfort. I read a book about someone who was diagnosed with the same type of cancer I had. At first, I thought her book would be helpful, but in the end, it just made me feel worse. The woman who wrote that book was someone well known, and she talked about her fans and the multitudinous posts on her social media pages. I didn’t have any of that. I had my husband and daughter, whom I am sincerely grateful for. But I didn’t have people checking up on me often. Heck, I had people that I thought were my friends stay away, because either the idea of cancer made them too uncomfortable or they didn’t know what to say, except for “You got this.”  I’m writing this so I have a good recollection of the whole event. Maybe this might help someone else. Maybe it won’t. But I wanted to at least write about my experience. In the spring of 2024, I decided to show my daughter, who was 12 at the time, how to do a breast self-exam. I remember we were in our hot tub, and she had asked me something about her body. She was at that age when kids are curious, and I wanted to encourage that curiosity. The human body is a beautiful thing and something most people know very little about. Anyway, I gave my daughter some anatomy information and showed her how to do the exam. During the exam, I felt a lump in my own breast.
I kept an eye on the lump by doing routine exams. When the lump began growing, I decided to make an appointment with a doctor. Now, we live in a small, secluded valley and don’t get the cream of the crop with regard to medical professionals. I’d been to many of the local doctors with my husband while he tried to figure out his own medical issues. None of the professionals seemed very knowledgeable, one even going so far as to consult her phone for information for a question my husband had asked her during an office visit. I’ve never been a supporter of our medical system. I believed for the longest time that most doctors were simply licensed drug pushers, considering the pharmaceutical industry funds most medical programs. I went to the doctor when I had no other choice. But this lump in my breast concerned me enough to make a doctor appointment. On July 17, 2024, I met with my general practitioner and an assistant, who was tagging along with her for the day. They did a cursory exam and referred me to get a mammogram and a biopsy on the lump. Still, I wasn’t overly concerned. The following week, I went to get a mammogram, my first ever. It was uncomfortable, but not as unpleasant as I’d heard mammograms were. Maybe a lot of the complaints came from a time before newer equipment was designed. I will give the medical system one point in its favor in that it’s continually designing and creating newer, more advanced, more sophisticated equipment.
This procedure was not nearly as tolerable. Not only had I been twisted in an uncomfortable position for nearly two hours, but I felt every snip. The doctor described the lymph nodes as a bunch of wet grapes he was trying to puncture. I was nearly in tears and about at the end of my ability to sit still. He managed to get the snip and placed titanium markers at the extraction points. He told me before he left that the lump was definitely cancer. I didn’t think doctors said things like that without proof from test results. I was shocked, to say the least. I had convinced both me and my family that there was nothing to worry about. I might need surgery to get the cyst out, but that was about it. I was wrong. The call I got from my GP the following week confirmed the worst. She was unexpectedly brief, considering she was telling me that I had cancer. She told me that she was referring me to an oncologist and flippantly wished that I had a good night before quickly hanging up. I have not seen that doctor again and never will. 2. Liminal Space
Stages 1, 2, and 3 are classified as curable because the treatment can, under the right circumstances, completely remove the cancer from the body. If the cancer moved beyond the lymph nodes, though, it would be in Stage 4. This is classified as incurable, which sounds terrible, but I learned that it isn’t necessarily fatal. It simply means the current treatments won’t get rid of all the cancer. Stage 4 would simply mean a constant battle for probably the remainder of my life. Needless to say, I was hoping for just Stage 3. I also had some bloodwork done at this time for genetic testing. No one in my family had ever had breast cancer, so how I got it was a mystery. I’d always believed that most cancer could be avoided, or at least the risk of getting it reduced, by following a proper diet. I won’t get into the flaws of our nutritional system here. Maybe another time. My point is that I believe the food we choose to eat has a dramatic impact on our health. I considered myself moderately healthy. I was well educated on nutrition. I admit I didn’t exercise as much as I should have, and I do carry several extra pounds that definitely didn’t help. But I certainly wasn’t in poor health. So why did I get cancer? I will probably never know. Anyway, the blood got sent to a lab, and I went off to get the PET scan and a breast MRI. The following week, I met with the surgeon. He was amazing as well. He explained in detail the history of breast surgeries over the past fifty years, as well as the advancements in cancer treatments. He was also very quick to mention that Stage 4, if that’s where I was, was not a death sentence. That made me a little concerned, but he apparently explained things the same way to everyone who passed through his office. He recommended getting something called a port surgically installed. This port would allow the chemo drugs to get into my system without the constant need for an IV. I have what nurses call deep, rolling veins. This means that even the most skilled nurses struggle to get a needle in me. My veins, like me, are particularly uncooperative. So I agreed to get the port, despite learning that a catheter was going to be inserted into my jugular vein, and it was through that catheter that the drugs were going to get into my system. As horrifying as that sounded, having the port would make future treatments easier to handle, and at this point, I was up for anything that would make my life a little easier, and maybe a little longer. The breast MRI was the most uncomfortable test I’ve ever had to get. Not because the procedure was painful, but because the process was so undignified and embarrassing. I mentioned that I carry a few extra pounds. This can make finding comfortably fitting hospital garb quite challenging. On this particular visit, the exam area came equipped with only small, medium, and large pants. The large ones were too tight. The nurse apologized but said there was nothing else for me to wear. I asked if I could just wear my regular pants. Absolutely not, the nurse replied. So I had to go into the room without any pants on, with just a blanket wrapped around me. To make the already embarrassing situation even worse, I had a male technician, and I had to climb onto an MRI bench that was too high. Someone had to bring a stool for me to step on just to get onto the darned machine. Then, while trying to keep my bottom half covered, I had to lie on my stomach and adjust my breasts to fit inside the cups allotted for the scan. This was surely some form of torture invented by a sadistic, breast-hating person. But I made it through the test, and I managed to get back to the lobby before bursting into tears. I was already tired of doctors and tests, and I hadn’t even started the treatment for the cancer yet. "Alas! For she was pitted against a foe beyond the strength of her mind or body." ~ J.R.R. TolkienOn the 15th of August, I went back to the oncologist’s office to discuss the results of the PET scan. It showed something suspicious on my liver, so I had to go back for an abdominal CT scan. This would tell us whether the suspicious spots on my liver were cancer, thus turning my Stage 3 into Stage 4. I had the test done on the 17th of August. My husband and I discussed not looking at the results until after my daughter’s 13th birthday, which was coming up on the 21st. After the CT scan, though, we went to lunch, and I got the notification while we were eating that the test results were ready. I decided to take a peek. I realized the waiting would be too much for me.
I also found out I had something called triple negative breast cancer, which meant the tumor had no estrogen, progesterone, or a protein called HER-2. That meant my cancer wasn’t treatable with hormone therapy. Triple negative breast cancer is also very aggressive, and so the oncologist said my treatment plan had to be just as aggressive. The plan was to do chemotherapy to shrink the tumor and kill the cancer in the lymph nodes. He set up a treatment plan of 12 weekly doses of Paclitaxel and Carboplatin. Then after that I would get 4 doses of Doxorubicin and Cyclophosphamide. These would be infused once every three weeks. In addition, I was going to get infusions of Keytruda once every three weeks for a whole year. Keytruda is an immunotherapy drug to help retrain my immune system to recognize future cancer cells, since cancer cells are cheeky and disguise themselves as regular, healthy cells that a healthy immune system ignores. We set up to start the treatment plan the week after my daughter’s birthday.
3. The First Infusion
The treatments are broken up into three-week segments. I would see the doctor on the first treatment in each segment. Sometimes I’d actually get the doctor at these appointments, but often I got his assistant. It was at one of these appointments that I got the results of the genetic testing. I found out I have something called a BRCA-1 gene mutation, which means my cancer was most likely genetically inherited. This confused me. No one in my family, to my knowledge, had ever had cancer. It wasn’t until after my husband set up a page on Facebook for friends to follow my progress that my aunt told me that both my maternal uncle and great-grandmother had died from pancreatic cancer. My gene mutation, I learned, made me more susceptible to developing pancreatic cancer, too, as well as ovarian cancer. Even worse, it meant my breast cancer was more likely to come back.
So the first chemo treatment started. I was given two pills at the start: Pepcid, to keep my stomach calm, and Benadryl, in case I had an allergic reaction to anything. Then I was hooked up to a super-strong anti-nausea medication by IV. This part of the infusion lasted about thirty minutes. The first drug I received was Keytruda. This is the immunotherapy drug. As I mentioned, this drug is designed to retrain my immune system to recognize cancer cells. Cancer cells are, after all, regular cells, just slightly mutated. The body basically sees them as nothing out of the ordinary. Keytruda attempts to get the immune system to recognize them and fight them the same way it fights foreign invaders in the body. The doctor told me I’d be taking seventeen of these doses, in three-week intervals. This infusion lasted another thirty minutes, followed by about ten to fifteen minutes of a saline flush of the port line. I drew a cartoon of the entire immunotherapy process. I’m not good at drawing, but I wanted to show how immunotherapy works in a way I could understand. Sorry if it’s a little hard to read.
The next drug I received was Paclitaxel. The nurses called it by its brand name, Taxol. This is a potent chemo drug that the doctors were hoping would shrink the tumor enough to make it manageable for surgical removal. It also has a long list of side-effects. It’s a shame that the bad things the drug causes almost outweigh the good that it does. But I suppose there’s truth to the statement that you can fight fire with fire. This infusion was supposed to take about ninety minutes, but about halfway through, I started feeling flushed. I initially chalked it up to hormones. In addition to fighting cancer, I was also going through menopause, and my hormones often chose the worst possible time to act up. My husband talked to the nurse, and she slowed the infusion drip. The flushing went away. The nurse explained that people react in different ways to the drug. She kept an eye on me, but when the flushing didn’t return, we figured all was good. Paclitaxel works by triggering fast-growing cells to die, but it doesn’t discriminate between cancer cells, red and white blood cells, or hair cells. The doctor had said what was left of my hair would probably fall out three to four weeks into the treatments. The last drug on the list for the day was Carboplatin. As the name suggests, this drug actually contains platinum, which works in conjunction with the Taxol to kill off the cancer cells. It was also the reason I was administered anti-nausea medication. I seemed to do fine with this one, and the infusion lasted another thirty minutes. After the treatment, I didn’t feel too terrible. I was weak and a little icky, but we went to lunch and then went home. I was okay for the next two days, and I thought: This is going to be easy. I can handle this. What I didn’t know at the time is that chemotherapy treatments are cumulative. The effects build up over time, making the last treatment much harder to recover from than the first one. 4. The Rest of the Weekly InfusionsThe next week, the infusion went about the same. More Benadryl, more Pepcid, more anti-nausea medication. The nurse told me the anti-nausea drug was supercharged and stayed in my system for about two days after the treatments. That made sense, because I had the infusion on Thursday, and it wasn’t until Sunday that I began to feel gross. I’d woken up Sunday morning weak and queasy, feeling as if I’d been run over by a truck. I didn’t get the Keytruda during this infusion. That’s the one given only once every three weeks, so this time it was just the Taxol and Carbo. The following week, my bloodwork came back showing a severe drop in both my red and white blood cells. The doctor decided to hold off on the infusion that week to allow my body a chance to recover. Week Four came, and it was once again time for Keytruda, Taxol, and Carbo. My body had begun to replenish its blood cells, though I was still slightly anemic, and my neutrophils were still low, though not dangerously so. Neutrophils make up most of the white blood cells, which the body uses to fight off infection and heal wounds. Mine were low, but still doing okay.
The chemo was hard on me, but also hard on my family. They had to watch helplessly as I struggled just to get out of my chair. I’m not the kind of person who can sit still and relax. The “R” word. It often eludes me. There was just always so much to do that I never felt right sitting still. However, I had no choice but to sit still now. I had the energy to do little more than lift a coffee cup. I was also the one who helped everyone else. I was the nurturer of the family. I was the one who took care of my husband and daughter. But I couldn’t do that now. I’ve always had a hard time asking for help. It was very humbling to have to ask my daughter to help me put my shoes on. I felt useless. Sure, I was dealing with a lot, but that had never stopped me before. But the chemotherapy was kicking my butt, and I had no choice but to ask for help. Everything I ate tasted terrible. Even my favorite comfort foods no longer brought me comfort. Water tasted as if I was drinking liquid metal. To try to deal with this, we bought several different bottled waters and I did a taste test. I found one brand that didn’t taste like I was sucking on a rusty nail, and so we bought literally gallons of the stuff. I kept it by my chair. Staying hydrated was a big concern. I managed the digestive issues, both constipation and diarrhea, sometimes at the same time, as odd as that sounds. But I struggled to get in enough water. We tried sports drinks to supplement my bottled water, but they all tasted terrible. We tried Pedialyte. Tasted terrible. Everything tasted terrible. Then I tried some different store-bought fruit juices. Tasted terrible. It was almost as if I could taste the unhealthiness of these diluted, sugary, heated-to-death drinks. At least I could tolerate the flavor of apple juice, so I drank that. I drank a lot of that. And I drank it not remembering that apples have a particular cleansing effect on the body. I developed severe abdominal pains and terrible diarrhea, but I hadn’t made the connection. On my next infusion, I told the nurse what was happening, and she recommended I stop the apple juice. So I did. But I struggled to find anything I could drink that was tolerable to my suddenly finicky tastebuds. Chocolate milk did the trick. I could drink it, anyway. I wasn’t sure how well it was going to hydrate me, but it was liquid and not terrible. Now, I don’t like milk. My body has a sensitivity to dairy that makes drinking milk generally unpleasant. I drank glass after glass of chocolate milk, and predictably, my body started to protest, screaming at me to stop. So it was back to water, which I choked down the best I could. The next visit to the doctor resulted in another postponement of treatment because my neutrophils were too low. The doctor sent me to a specialty pharmacy to get some shots of Filgrastim to help my body build back up the cells that the chemo was killing off too efficiently. The side effects of this drug scared me, especially the one that could cause my spleen to enlarge and even rupture. I have a habit of naming everything, including inanimate objects. Now I even began naming my internal organs. I named my liver Lucinda and imagined her as an overworked, underpaid desk clerk who looked exhausted and exasperated as more and more work got piled on her desk. I named my spleen Spinoza, and I hoped like heck that Spinoza wouldn’t explode. Around the time of my eighth infusion, I began noticing a numbness in my feet and hands. Chemo-induced neuropathy is apparently common. The doctors decided to keep an eye on the situation and continue with the treatments. It wasn’t until I began dropping things from the lack of feeling in my fingers that they decided to stop the Taxol. I also started feeling so short of breath that I thought I might pass out just walking across the room. Our bedroom is on the second level of our house, and there were some nights when I literally had to crawl up the stairs just to get to bed. My energy level was extremely low, and I just couldn’t catch my breath. It was terrible. The doctor said it was probably just a result of my chemo-induced anemia, but just to be safe he sent me for a CT scan to make sure pneumonia hadn’t set in. The results came back negative, and I was prescribed an Albuterol inhaler to use as needed. Even though I didn’t get my last three Taxol treatments, the neuropathy kept getting worse. The doctor said the nerve damage should heal … sometime down the road, like maybe six to twelve months. But there was no guarantee. I was tempted to end the treatments altogether, but he asked if I would at least continue the Carboplatin, since I didn’t seem to have much trouble with that one … yet. I agreed and went to the infusion room for an abbreviated visit, or so I thought. Apparently, it happens sometimes that the Carboplatin builds up in the system and can cause an allergic reaction, sometimes weeks into treatment. Well, guess what? I was one of those rare cases. It started with some sneezing, which isn’t uncommon for me. What is uncommon is for me to sneeze only once. I often sneeze ten times in a row. So when I started sneezing, no one really paid any attention to it. Then my hands began to itch. I have a surface allergy to mold. When I touch anything with mold or mildew on it, my hands itch and swell. I thought I’d touched something and so went to the bathroom to wash my hands. When the itching didn’t go away, my husband called over a nurse. Within minutes, the entire infusion team was buzzing around my chair as they tried to stop the reaction with megadoses of Benadryl. My face and throat started swelling, making it hard to breathe. They offered me a trip to the emergency room, but I declined as the reaction eventually started to slow. When the doctor’s assistant came by and saw my ballooned face, she decided to stop the remainder of the treatments.
5. Round Two of ChemotherapyFor the second round of chemotherapy, I was getting infused with two new drugs. I was continuing on with the Keytruda, my immunotherapy drug, but added to the mix now were Doxorubicin and Cyclophosphamide. These drugs scared me, especially Doxorubicin, notoriously dubbed as The Red Devil. I wrote a Facebook post sharing my story about how I was using my paint-pouring hobby as a form of art therapy to deal with my anxiety about this drug with the terrifying reputation. This is one of the most potent chemo drugs out there, and the side effects are genuinely scary. My cancer was aggressive, so my treatment plan needed to be as well. But I wasn’t prepared for this. Normally, the chemo drugs drip down from IV bags through my port. The nurse monitors the progress and unhooks me when the machine beeps that it’s done. Not so with Doxorubicin. I was given a cup of ice and told to chew for the entire ten-minute infusion. Why? To prevent mouth sores. The nurse also had to manually inject the crimson liquid, all the while checking to make sure the medicine was going where it was supposed to go. Why? Because this drug basically kills whatever it touches. It’s called the Red Devil for a very good reason. The other drug, Cyclophosphamide, is also potent, but it has a much less devilish reputation. Luckily, I didn’t have too much trouble with this one overall. Then after this and every treatment, I got a shot of Filgrastim to force my body to manufacture the white blood cells that the chemo was killing off. After the first treatment of Round Two, I got severe nausea and diarrhea. I couldn’t keep anything in at either end, leading to severe dehydration. I called the nurse line at the cancer center and was advised to get an infusion of fluids, either at the cancer center or in my local ER. The cancer center that I went to for my treatments is nearly an hour away, so I opted for the ER a few towns over. I was apparently used to having my body feel and look as if I was on death’s door, but after the ER doctor reviewed my bloodwork, he came back into my room looking pale. He said my neutrophils were bottomed out at 0.7, which meant I basically had no immune system, which meant a hospital full of sick people was about the worst place I could be. I got some fluids, which took forever because the staff hooked the IV up to my port, which administers fluids much more slowly than a regular IV does. Then I went home, basically quarantining myself in my house until my battered immune system could handle the outside world. I didn’t emerge until it was time for my second treatment.
I couldn’t do it. Not only was my brain too cluttered to write, but my fingers just fumbled on the keyboard, and my eyes were foggy. I had to resign myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to get a novel written in 2024. I managed to struggle through my remaining three treatments. Then, on February 10, 2025, I had my last infusion of chemo drugs. Now, it was off to the surgeon. 6. The Surgery KerfuffleOnce the chemo was complete, I had some decisions to make about how much of my body I wanted to surgically remove. Some people, when they discover that they have the BRCA-1 gene mutation, opt to have a complete bilateral mastectomy: Both breasts are completely removed. The benefit of taking this route is that the chance for the cancer to return in the breast area is less than 1%. There is also rarely a need for follow-up radiation, since there basically isn’t any breast tissue left. The downside, other than having to psychologically adjust to the loss of a body part, is that recovery is pretty lengthy and painful. The other option I had was a lumpectomy. The remainder of the tumor is removed, the breast is otherwise kept intact, and the situation is closely monitored for any return visit of the cancer. This was obviously a less invasive approach, and the recovery was much easier. Another thing I had to consider was my reproductive system. Because of the BRCA-1, I was at a higher risk for ovarian cancer. The surgeon had said that since I was already through menopause, removing the ovaries would be a simple and uncomplicated process. Heck, he even offered to do a complete hysterectomy if that was what I wanted him to do. Throughout this entire journey, I’d relied on the advice from my oncologist to help make decisions. But at my final chemo treatment, the nurses told me that I was going to be getting a letter in the mail informing me that my oncologist was leaving the cancer center to begin working at a hospital closer to his home. He drove over an hour one way to work, so I understood his desire to be closer to his home and family. What I didn’t understand was why I was left in limbo right when I had crucial surgical decisions to make. So when I talked to the surgeon, I hadn’t been advised that I’d be expected to make a life-altering decision pretty much on the spot. I listened to my options and then did probably the most unhelpful thing I could do: I burst into tears right in the middle of the appointment. The surgeon probably thought I was a flake. Or maybe he was used to having irrational and emotional people in his office. But this was too much pressure. I asked him if I could think about it over the weekend and give him my decision on Monday. He agreed and said he’d put a note in my file for someone from the oncology office to give me a call. Well, no one called. Ever. I spent the entire weekend weighing the pros and cons of each decision. One minute I was determined that the complete mastectomy was the best option. Then not an hour later, I was convinced that just the lumpectomy was the way to go. I was miserable, and I probably made my family miserable as well. After clearing up some statistics with the surgeon on recurrence and survival rates, I opted for the lumpectomy. And on March 27, that was what I did. The morning of the surgery, we had to pile in the car early so I could get to the imaging center and get another breast MRI done before I went to the hospital. I also had to get another mammogram so the surgeon could have a current view of the markers showing where the biopsy was done. He was going to remove the markers during surgery. I left the imaging office with some string hanging out of me, for some reason that I can’t even recall, and I went over to the hospital and waited my turn for surgery. The procedure itself took about an hour. While the surgeon had me opened up, he took a sample of a lymph node and some tissue surrounding what was left of the tumor. I would have to wait a week or so for the results. And let me tell you, the waiting is the worst. I went home that afternoon without the tumor but with a drainage tube. The tube went inside my armpit, to the area where the surgeon had removed all the lymph nodes the cancer had killed. A pretty big pocket had been left behind, but I didn’t find out why until later, when I talked to the radiologist. The drainage tube was annoying and really, really gross. I had to measure the amount of liquid that drained out of my body into a collection pouch over a twenty-four-hour period. Once it got under a certain level, I could go in and get the tube removed. Luckily, my husband is able to deal with gross things and handled the collection pouch for me. I just had to deal with the discomfort of a tube sticking out of the side of my body and the annoyance of a plastic pouch clipped to my pajama shirt. I slept sitting up in my chair the whole time, because I was afraid that I’d roll over in my sleep, squish the pouch, and spurt disgusting liquid all over the bed. The chair was uncomfortable, and I got little sleep. I couldn’t wait for this thing to come out. Finally, a week and a half later, the fluid was coming out at a low enough that I could head back to the surgeon’s office and have the drainage tube removed. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but I sure didn’t expect the nurse to snip the tape holding the tube in and simply pull it out. It felt weird. Not painful, but definitely weird. I’m happy I didn’t know what was about to happen, or else I would have freaked out.
The wound was still healing when I went for my next immunotherapy session and oncology doctor visit. At the infusion, I met with the doctor and was told the surgeon’s biopsy results were in: As of that moment, I was cancer-free. That was wonderful news and made all the difficulties over the past eight months worth it. I’d survived the chemo that had tried really hard to kill my blood cells faster than I could make them. I still couldn’t feel my feet or fingertips, but I was alive and had beaten the cancer. My goal was to keep things that way by making my body as inhospitable for a return visit as I could, starting with making fresh, healthy meals. The goal was there, but reality deterred me. I was still regaining my strength and stamina. I could now walk across the room without feeling as if I’d run a marathon, but I still struggled to get from the car into stores, and even up the stairs to bed. My meal plans would have to wait just a bit longer. 7. The Radiation ExperienceWe met with the radiologist on April 28. He was a really personable guy. One of the first things he asked me is whether I’d seen the results of the PET scan. I hadn’t. The oncologist had discussed the findings with me, but I hadn’t seen the actual scan. So the radiologist pulled it up, and I was amazed at how bright it was. I was told that cancer cells glowed on the scan. The scan looked like a Christmas tree. He asked me if I’d known how bad the cancer had been. I apparently had not. He said that probably no one told me because they didn’t want to discourage me from believing that I could beat it. I knew I had Stage 3 cancer, but I didn’t know the stages were further broken down. I apparently had Stage 3C cancer, which is about as bad as it can get before it moves to Stage 4. I had cancer in thirteen of my lymph nodes. But he said I had responded incredibly well to the chemo treatment — better than anyone had hoped for. Everyone, that is, except me. I never doubted that I would beat cancer. I told my husband something that has stuck with him over the months. I told him that the idea that I wouldn’t survive never even entered my head. It may be naïve of me, but that’s how I am. I believe I can do something. and I do it. I believed I would survive, and I did. More on that later. The oncologist had told me that radiation treatments can run as long as five to six weeks, daily. Mind you, we have to drive nearly an hour one way for what would be a fifteen-minute treatment. The idea of having to do this for five to six weeks, five days a week, nearly undid me. But the radiologist gave us some good news. Since I had responded so well to the chemo, he was confident that I wouldn’t need more than 15 sessions. That meant just three weeks, instead of five or six. I’d take it. I came back the following week for a test run. I wondered what exactly anybody needed to test. Boy, did I find out. Apparently, the radiology team had to make sure I laid in the exact same position for each session. This was accomplished by making a foam pillow of my body and tattooing three dots on my abdomen to pinpoint the lasers. Before this day, I had never had anything permanently tattooed on my skin. I tossed around the idea when I was in college of getting a tattoo, but I could never bring myself to do it. I tried to think of what I could put on my body that wouldn’t look ridiculous when I was eighty years old with wrinkly, saggy skin. Now, I’ll have those three little dots on my skin for the rest of my life. Like my scars, they’re reminders of what I survived. The hardest part of the radiation was having to hold my breath. Not only do you have to be in the very same position for each session, but you can’t even breathe while you’re being radiated. I had to wear a nose plug and put a snorkel-like tube in my mouth so the technicians could monitor my breathing, and so that I could only breathe through my mouth. This snorkel thing had in it a valve to stop the air from coming in when I’d inhaled far enough and was in the correct position for the machine to start. I had control over a button that I pressed when I inhaled and held until I needed to exhale. This button kept the valve closed so no air could get in or out of the tube until the technicians were ready for me to move. I don’t have claustrophobia, nor do I have any issues with holding my breath. Sure, I didn’t want to die from drowning or strangulation, but I didn’t have a phobia of either. But the sensation of being unable to breathe is unique and quite scary. Breathing is a function I’d rarely thought about unless I was trying to calm down or had a head cold. It’s something the body does automatically. But when you deny your body the ability to do something that had previously happened without any conscious thought, you become much more aware of the function. And you become grateful that the human body is so amazing. I couldn’t imagine having to always mentally command my body to breathe. But for the radiation treatments, that was exactly what I had to do. I did have some control over the process. The machine would stop running the moment I released the button. Also, I could breathe, just not while the machine was running. The whole thing was still terrifying, but not as much as it had first seemed when I felt I had no control. I was warned that the effects of the radiation wouldn’t become an issue until two to three weeks after my treatments had ended. After the daily treatments, my skin had been red and warm, but I rubbed the lotion on as I’d been instructed to do, and all seemed good. I made it through the fifteen sessions, and on June 5, I got to ring the gong in the lobby to indicate I’d completed my last session. And true to everyone’s word, about two weeks after my last session, I began to feel the symptoms. Radiation is hard on the body. Yes, we get radiation naturally from the sun. Anyone who’s had a bad sunburn knows this. But the radiation for cancer treatment is extremely concentrated. Fortunately, I didn’t have my entire body irradiated, just the left side of my chest and armpit. Still, there were other side effects. Fatigue was an issue, as my already battered body struggled to heal the damaged skin. Healing was slow, too, as my white blood cell count was still quite low. Luckily, water had begun to taste less like metal and more like water, so I was able to drink plenty of fluids. And my energy level slowly improved, to the point I could make dinner again. During the radiation appointments, my family and I ate out every day. I just didn’t have the energy to make dinner when we got home. But when the appointments ended, I was excited to cook again. The process has been slow as I work to improve my strength and stamina, but I’m getting there.
8. What's Next?As of this writing, I have four more immunotherapy sessions to complete. Once that’s done, I’ll have to keep working on regaining my strength. Sitting and resting during the chemo caused some of my muscle tissue to deteriorate, and I need to build those muscles back up. My focus needs to be core strength. I still struggle to stand for any length of time without getting an aching back. Building core strength is hard for me because with the arthritis in my hip, I can’t easily get down on the floor. And if I manage to get down, it practically takes a crane to get me up. I’m working on it and need to make sure I have plenty of patience with myself. As I mentioned, I’ve always had a hard time sitting still. When I was too sick to do anything other than sit, I managed to override my desire to get stuff done. But now that I’m beginning to feel better, I’m eager to work on all the things that didn’t get done while I was recovering. I need to pace myself, which is hard for me. I need to rest intermittently, but not for too long, or else I tend to stiffen up. It's a fine line that I’m learning to navigate, and one of many changes I need to make. My daughter, who has a gift for drawing, had created a cartoon of a family of anthropomorphic axolotls. In her story, the family had an uncle come to visit for Christmas, and he just never left. They tried to encourage him to leave without being rude, but he just decided to make the living room his bedroom, and he slept on the couch indefinitely. She named the unwanted guest Uncle Jackson. As I mentioned, I have a habit of naming everything, from the house I live in to the cookware I use in the kitchen to Lucinda Liver and Spinoza Spleen. I named my tumor Uncle Jackson, because like the character in my daughter’s story, the tumor was an unwanted guest — one that, now that I’d managed to get it off the couch and out the door, I wanted to discourage from a return visit.
9. Conclusion: Positive vs. NegativeI’ve heard people say that getting cancer was a positive influence in their life, that they were actually grateful they got it because it helped them appreciate life more. I’m not grateful that I got cancer, but I am grateful for the lessons I learned from it. I’m more aware of my mortality and wake up every morning with a positive outlook. I’ve always been an optimistic person, often being accused of being naïvely so. I see the good in the world. I believe in magic. I’m the person who, when we moved to Idaho, cut air holes in the boxes containing my gargoyles so that they could breathe until I could unpack them. What can I say? I’m a fiction writer and love telling stories. Sometimes we need the fantasy to survive the reality. I don’t consider my optimism to be naïve. It’s not that I don’t realize the world is difficult and harsh. It’s just that I choose to focus my energy on the positive rather than the negative. As I mentioned, I always believed that I would survive cancer. It honestly never entered my head that I wouldn’t. That’s just how I am. I believe positive energy is healing. There were days I just wanted to curl up in a ball of self-pity and scream, “Why me?” But I realized that wouldn’t help me. When I would wake up in the morning and struggle just to get out of bed, I’d breathe, and I’d smile, and I’d think of how wonderful it was to be alive. I hurt, and my body was damaged, but I was alive, and I was going to love every minute of that day because I got to spend it with my family.
As I look down at the scars and tattoos along the left side of my body, I smile. I was stronger than that which tried to defeat me.
And I still am.
3 Comments
|
RSS Feed
|
|
