Transcript:
“Got it? OK. Um, are you going to ask me questions along the way, or no?
I might just do that.
OK. Yeah. That’s good. ‘Cause otherwise I could talk forever. Um, I feel like I can’t start…I feel like I can’t start this without saying that the whole cancer um time frame of my life started back in two thousand seven (2007) which I was married at the time and my husband then was diagnosed with tonsil cancer. So, he had a really, really rough go at it
and it was a tough…head and neck cancer is just a tough cancer in general. He is great today and he’s uh you know completely healthy. So yay for that. Um, but he had a really rough go at it. So, about a year after his diagnosis, I was going in for my annual you know ladies visit, or whatever. And breast cancer runs in my family, so both my mom and my maternal grandmother both had breast cancer. And both before the age of fifty. And I really kind of always felt like it’s weird…it’s weird thinking about it now, but I know growing up there were plenty of times where it might have just been like a fleeting thought, but that I had, like I just thought like it might be in my cards, right? I, I don’t even know if we talked so much about genetics back then, but it was just like I just kind of felt like it was in the cards. So, I was always really cautious about like self-examination, or whatever. So, I have gone to my gynecologist prior, and I wanted to go…there’s a whole BRCA testing was coming out, right? BRCA, the genetic ties to see if you have that, if you have that genetic tie, and if so, um there’s certain things that you really ought to be cautious about regarding your breasts and your ovaries. And because of my family history at that point, it’s like I wanted to get this test. So I called my off-, the office of the doctor, made an appointment, and before anything, you have to have like this “counseling session” to talk about exactly what the test will show and what you plan on doing if you get a positive result. So in my mind, I was like, I was ready. I’m like if I get a positive result, I’m gonna get a double mastectomy. Like I pro- like prophylactically, because I’d rather deal with that than ever having to go through chemo, right? So I’d seen family members that had to that had to go to that and it’s brutal. So anyway I go to the doctor’s office, we have this little meeting, we’re talking, um, she understands where I’m coming from, blah blah blah. It doesn’t get approved by insurance, which was a weird thing because you have to qualify for this test, which I qualified on numerous levels. But, for whatever reason, the insurance company was battling it. In the meantime, I have another appointment set up for a mammogram. So, before I go to my appointment for the mammogram, like a cou-, a few days before, uh, maybe a week before, whatever, I call my doctor back up and I said, “You know, is it OK if you give me a diagnostic mammogram instead of just a regular mammogram?” So a “diagnostic” means you go through the normal mammogram, but then you get an ultrasound afterwards. So, so it just gives you a lot more images. So I had this like…I think at the time if I had to look back, I was thinking that way because my ex-husband had gone through cancer, cancer was on my mind, like I just wanted a clean bill of health. And I knew that was like the most efficient way of doing it. Plus, this is so weird, but at that time, you know how like I don’t know if you’re thinking something or you have something on your mind, and you seem to see it everywhere you go? Like you just you open up the newspaper and it’s like there’s an article about it, or whatever. That seemed to be happening to me. And I was driving into the city one time, or actually it was on my way to the mammogram, and there was this billboard up on the highway, and Christina Applegate the actress had just, like she had a show that came out, like some sitcom that came out, and she had just gone through breast cancer. So it was like everywhere I looked, there was some sign like coming at me. So I go, I go to my mammogram, she does the mammogram, She does…and then I could tell that something’s up. They call me back for additional imaging or whatever. So that just says the doctor wants to talk to you. So here I’m thinking they’re just being, there’s like something there that they have to see. But what are the chances? Because at that point I’m thirty-eight years old. Like, what are the chances of me having breast cancer? Like, very slim. So, she calls me in, and I’m there by myself, and she tells me that she can tell from the way that it looked that I have breast cancer. And I was like, “What?” And my reaction to that was I laughed. And obviously it was like this, like a coping mechanism maybe, or um it was more in a way like a disbelief obviously, but I just remember laughing. Not hysterical laughing, but laughing almost like, “You’ve got to be kidding me! Like my husband just went through cancer. Like there’s gotta be some mistake, right.” So, anyway, it was not a mistake. Um, I had to go in for uh a MRI and then uh biopsies, and all this stuff. So they figure all this stuff out. I have, it wasn’t really a lump. It was in my milk ducts. So, because it was in multiple places, I had no choice but to get a mastectomy on the left side, which, I gotta be honest, was kind of a relief because sometimes I’m not good at making decisions. Do you know what I mean? Like if they said to me, “Well, your decision will be either mastectomy or lumpectomy and then either chemo and radiation”, I’m gonna be like, “Oh, God, I do not know what the right call is, you know, blah blah blah”. The decision was made for me. I didn’t have a choice. It was like, “OK. Done.” Then my next you know question that I had to answer was do I just do one side, or do I do both? Knowing that there was really nothing wrong with the other side but at this point like what’s the point of keeping one side? Like what, why, I couldn’t, I couldn’t justify it. So I made the decision of doing both, and I feel like…I don’t ever remember crying, like through…or feeling um scared, or I was more in disbelief than anything. But I didn’t have any of those emotions that you would think kind of that would go along with a cancer diagnosis, and I really think part of it was because when Stan, my ex-husband, went through his, that was so brutal, like so brutal, I think it taught me…like I feel lucky I guess is the bottom line. Like what I went through was easy compa-, compared to what so many people go through. Do you know what I mean? And I saw that, like I felt like no matter what, I know mine’s gonna be easier than what he went through. So I kind of hung on to that. Anyway, I go in for surgery, I end up getting a double mastectomy, they send it to pathology. They find out that it was also in my other side. But the cells were too small for any test to pick up, and they said, “You would have been back here in a couple of years doing the exact same thing.” So, I feel like you know there’s so many, so many more like added details that I can go into at that, which I’m going to get to a couple in a minute, but…Since that I’ve been this huge proponent, I know that there’s a time like mammograms you know I don’t know if it’s the health department, or I don’t know who it is, but saying like you don’t even have to get a mammogram, mammogram anymore until you’re you know fifty, or just a baseline mammogram. It’s like had I not gotten that diagnostic mammogram…because the mammogram itself did not show anything. It was the, the ultrasound afterward that picked up on these cells. So I think about that, and it’s like here are these women who, you know we try to be advocates for our own health and, you know, to know that you can’t go in and say, “I want a diagnostic mammogram” because your insurance isn’t going to cover for, cover it anymore, for just because you want it, even if it’s like a routine exam, right, or an annual checkup, but you also, you have to rely on the insurance because it’s too expensive to pay out of pocket. But these are people’s lives. Like I, it kills me to think about that, and I’ll tell you, after my diagnosis, on my block where I live, four other women had breast cancer, all within the following year. And two of them had the hardest time because of insurance. Two of them didn’t. But the two that had a hard time, their lives were brutal for so long, and the cancer had spread. And like it dragged it on for so long that the stage was greater, it’s, it metastasized, and it’s like I think about that type of stuff all the time. So when October comes around, you know I do feel lucky, I think sometimes I almost have like a guilt mentality, kind of like, yeah, I had cancer, but I was really freaking lucky on every avenue when it comes to that. Like for b-, I had the best of a bad situation. I feel like the least I can do is you know raise some sort of awareness. I don’t even know if it means anything, but I always feel like if I can remind one person to go get that mammogram, or if you feel in you know some intuition that you need further testing, talk to your doctor and don’t settle for less. You know what I mean? So it was uh definitely a learning period. I do remember afterward, after you have the surgery, you have like drainage tubes, you know this is where it gets probably kind of gross, and feel free to like edit whatever you wanna like…
OK.
…hack (?) out afterwards. I’m not gonna be like totally gross. It’s actually kind of funny, but anyway, you have drainage tubes, like after pretty much any surgery that’s pretty in depth(?) And the things at the end that collect the drainage I used to call them grenades ‘cause it looked just like a clear grenade, like that’s just how it looked. So, you’d have to tie, you know, You’d have so many hours during the day or between times that you’d have to write down how much um fluid came out and you know you have to write it down and the time and how many CC’s blah blah blah. So, because of the pain that was involved in the mastectomy, which I came to find out that the mastectomy is not pain-causing. It’s the reconstruction afterward because they do it at the same time part of it so that the mastectomy is just like you’re removing tissue, which actually is not painful. But it’s the reconstruction where they have to move the muscle off the chest wall, so that’s the time when you’re thinking like OK you don’t realize how much you use that chest muscle. Do you know what I mean? Like to get in and out of bed, to get yourself up from a chair, it’s like we take it so for granted. So I had to sleep in a recliner for at least three months because I couldn’t lay flat. So I was in the recliner and it was like I was home for a couple of weeks after the surgery and I had multiple surgeries and my mom was spending the night. So she was sleeping in my bed, I was sleeping in the recliner in room, my husband at the time was in the spare room, and I was getting up to go to the bathroom. and as I, like I could almost, I almost feel like I might faint just talking about it.
No!
No. No. I’m not gonna faint. But as I get up to go to the bathroom, the grenade, one of them got stuck in the recliner…
No!
But I didn’t know. So I go to stand up, and it just rips right out of me. And I start screaming. and, and it didn’t hurt. It just felt weird. But still I knew something was wrong, right? So I’m like, “Mom, I’m going down. I am going down.” And I just passed out flat as can be. It’s like those were the types of things that I had to laugh through. I mean at that moment it was obviously scary. But about five minutes later I had to laugh at it because between all that stuff, having two young kids at the time, going through it a year prior with you know husband, it’s like times were so crazy. My oldest at the time was six. Seven when I had surgery. My youngest, Finn, he was four.
Very active time for boys. Yeah. Very active.
And I remember…Oh, my God. And you know they just remember their mom and dad in and out of the hospital really. Um, but I remember River, I was in the closet and I was grabbing some clothes or whatever, and he said, “You know…”, this is, he was seven, he goes, “You know, I was thinking, I just want to get cancer and get it over with. I’m like, “Oh, no, buddy, like that is not how it works.” Like it was such a dagger, a dagger in the heart. So it’s like OK parenting moment, you know. So you sit him down, and you’re like, “Buddy, it’s…for your mom and your dad both to have had it is crazy but that’s why we need to keep up on our health. And we have to you know go see doctors every year for our physical. And you know we also know a lot of people that have had cancer that are still with us.” And I named you know some people. But it’s like you don’t know what goes on in these little kids’ minds. Right? Like it was so, I think, it was so gut-wrenching at the time. Um, but again, for me, I, my lymph nodes were clean. I didn’t have to have radiation. I didn’t have to have chemo. The only thing I had was the mastectomy. And then I had a bunch of surgeries for reconstruction. Um, and then that’s it. It’s like it’s really, I really kind of had, I kind of had it easy. I almost feel guilty about it."
Comments