Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Breast cancer is a war, and you have to do everything you can. You have to
fight to win that war. It's metastatic, it's inflammatory, it's a huge
tumor, and they're going to cut off my breast. You find out all of this
within a week. You go from being perfectly healthy to feeling like, OK, I'm
dying. I don't even feel sick, how can I be dying? When I found out I had
breast cancer, it started a whirlwind of things that I never anticipated
having to go through. My name is Bonnie and I was diagnosed with Stage III
metastatic, inflammatory lymph node involved breast cancer, on September
11th, 2008.
I was taking a bath one day, and I was doing my monthly self breast exam,
and as I was doing my exam, I felt a strange feeling in my left breast. It
didn't feel like a lump, but it just felt like a hard spot, a hardening
that was there. So, I felt again and I thought, "That doesn't feel right.
What's wrong?" So I got out of the tub, I ran to my daughter. "Feel my
breast, does this feel funny?" "Well yeah, it does feel kind of funny."
So, then I thought, "Well, I need to go to the doctor." So, I made an
appointment to go to the doctor. I went in, they did a mammogram and they
did a sonogram, and then they did a biopsy. By that time I was really
worried, so then the waiting began because I had to wait for them to give
me the results of all of those tests.
I was at work on a Friday, September 11th, and my telephone rang and my
doctor said, "We got the results of your tests. You have metastatic breast
cancer." I sat there for a minute and I said, "Metastatic? That means it's
spreading, right?" And he said, "Yes. But we did some tests on it, it
doesn't respond to hormones but there's this new drug out called Herceptin
that we have a lot of success with, but what we need to do is schedule an
appointment for you to go over to the breast surgeon and we'll just take
care of this for you." He made it sound so easy.
I got my purse, locked my door, got in my car and drove to this little spot
with trees, and I cried, and I cried. Then, I called my sister, and I cried
some more. When I made my first visit to my oncologist, she examined me and
she said, "I cannot guarantee to save your life, but I'll do whatever I can
to try and extend your life." I thought about that, and you know what I
decided? I said nobody can guarantee to save my life, even if I don't have
breast cancer, so I'm not going to take that personally that I can't be
cured from this. I said, "She can't guarantee, but life has no guarantees."
I decided, well, I'll just have to fight this thing. I'll do whatever it
takes. When you think about options, it means you have a choice of
different things to do. For me, if I didn't have chemo, if I didn't have
surgery, it meant that I didn't reduce my odds of cancer recurring. This
was a war for me. I was backed into a corner, and I came out fighting,
because I wanted to kill it.
My very first chemo session, I expected to just start throwing up by the
time the medicine started going in me, because I had seen all of these
movies where people were so sick with the chemo. I didn't get sick right
away and I thought, "That's interesting. I was expecting to get really
nauseated." That came later, but the medicines had a lot of different side
effects in addition to the nausea that I was expecting.
The cocktail that they gave me, caused muscle twitching, and my eye would
twitch all the time and I felt like Igor. I'd walk around sometimes, and
I'd hold my eye as I was talking to people because I was embarrassed that
my eye would be twitching. The best thing for me during chemo was to eat
chocolate. Chocolate tastes delicious when you're going through chemo, when
nothing else tastes the same.
One thing that I found helpful when I started through my treatment journey
was, I took a tape recorder with me. I recorded all of the conversations
that I had with my doctor because I found that, depending on what they told
me, I would start thinking, my mind would wander about the what ifs, and I
would miss some of the things that they were saying. So, with the tape
recorder, I could take it home and listen to it over and over for as many
times as I needed to, or I could share with my family so I didn't have to
keep repeating what the doctor said.
You don't have to go through it by yourself. There are support groups out
there. There are other people who have gone through it. If you surround
yourself with those people, talk to them, share your experiences and listen
to their experiences, there's a whole wealth of support that you can get
from those things. I was always very independent, and I've learned with
breast cancer, you can't always be independent. You have to be dependent on
people to help you through. I think that's a very important lesson for me,
and if I walk away without learning anything else from breast cancer, it's
that there's some things in life that you have to share. You have to have
somebody to lean on, and they'll help you get through it.