CATCH IT EARLY OR IT WILL CATCH YOU

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I just celebrated my fifteenth ‘birthday’. Those of you that know me will be surprised, since obviously I have been around for a great deal longer than fifteen or even fifty years. But I am speaking of my fifteen years of being cancer-free following that dreaded diagnosis that we all fear: breast cancer.

The diagnosis did not come totally out of the blue, although I did not have the usual predisposition for developing it. Therefore, when I found a tiny lump in my left breast in mid-2001, I tried to point it out to my doctor, a very shy gentleman who preferred cases of influenza or broken bones to having to palpate a lady’s breast lumps more than superficially. He diagnosed polycystic breasts, and suggested that I cut back on coffee.

But this did not feel like a cyst, which through the skin feels like a tiny but slightly tender balloon. This felt like a grain of rice. Over a few months it began to feel more like a hard split pea. I would probably have checked on it had it been painful, but it didn’t hurt.

I put off my annual mammogram, because I wanted to attend a retreat in South Korea. But there I began to have dreams about passed-away friends: not just any passed-away friends, but those that had lost battles with cancer. Every night, one or another of them showed up at my bedside, saying, “You should go to a doctor about that.” When I came home, I scheduled a mammogram and a visit to my gynecologist. Looking at the X-ray, he said, “I think it’s a fatty cyst.” Then I got a call from the radiologist. She and the doctor were at odds about what they were looking at. She thought it was a tumor. “Waste your time if you want,” the doctor said, “But I say it’s just a cyst.”

The doctor was wrong.

Exploratory surgery found a Type III Stage 1 tumor in the upper left quadrant of my left breast, the classic place where breast cancers tend to form. Mine was 1.25cm in size -- .25cm larger than the size that one just gets a zap of radiation, a pat on the head and an advisement to monitor it closely. At that size, the cancer, which was in a milk duct, could well spread through the blood and lymph system. To avoid metastasis and certain death, I was in for the full treatment, which would include chemotherapy and radiotherapy. I was now in the hands of a surgeon and an oncologist. “Don’t worry,” the surgeon said. “The next six months are really going to suck, but this won’t take a day off your life.”

Things happened over the next six months that were just not pleasant: I had biopsies and a lumpectomy. I lost not only my luxurious head of hair, but my eyebrows, lashes—every strand on my body except that pesky one right under my chin, which absolutely would not die. My immune system went on holiday. I didn’t get warnings when it wasn’t working, since there was nothing to do battle. I couldn’t go to church, and as a psychotherapist I could see clients only individually and only if they were absolutely healthy.

A coughing coworker put me in ICU-isolation for a week, and I’m not sure my oncologist expected me to walk out of that. I could not eat fresh fruit or vegetables because of the possibility of microbes that could lead to deadly infections, and even if I could have, I probably couldn’t have kept them down. I dubbed my toilet my ‘porcelain pal’, as I always seemed to be hugging it. I refused to wear a port for injections, meaning that every time I got chemotherapy it had to go through a new needle hole in my arm. And there were follow-up shots for seven days after each chemo battery, which my husband learned to give me. They cost over $3,000 a shot. Thank goodness for insurance!

Right after chemotherapy ended came a series of radiation treatments, 36 in all, for which I had to gain 35 pounds in order to move my heart out of the way of the beam. That was kind of fun. No, it was great: Rocky Road ice cream, key lime pie, anything that would pack on the pounds. Fortunately, it was summer by then, and I wrapped myself in ethnic clothes and big earrings, as fuzz began to finally sprout up on my dome.

I suffered radiation burns and my super-irradiated breast retracted. That meant I had to reduce the size of the healthy breast from a Double D to what the surgeon called ‘a robust C’. I didn’t require implants and the surgery went well enough that I don’t really need to wear a bra anymore. I still had to go to an oncology clinic, however, for examinations and bloodwork. One of the happiest days of my life was when the oncologist told me, after ten years, that I didn’t need to see him anymore.

When I moved to a new city, I went to a new oncologist just to be sure. He said only eight words: “Why are you here? You don’t need me.”