Talkin with Teenie: Sherry's Story

October 23, 2009

Sherry's Story

Guest Post by Sherry @ Everyday Possibilities

Life was moving at a fast pace for me in the spring of 2005. I was busy with my children, I had been working part time and was ready to move back into the world of full time employment. Life looked good, it looked promising and it seemed I was on track to be realizing some dreams and goals that I had set for myself. With that in mind, I booked a complete physical which included a very thorough breast exam and my doctor suggested a mammogram since it had been a few years since my last one. I was early to be having mammograms in my 40s, but because I had felt a lump a few years earlier which turned out to be a cyst I was now eligible to have them every few years. I booked the mammogram and the soonest time available was the morning of a big job interview but I knew I wanted to have the mammogram done before I started working full time. Providence? My inner voice telling me to go as soon as possible? No one has the answer to that but it was the mammogram that changed my life. Malignant tumour of 2 cms. Stage II Infiltrating Ductal Carcinoma with one lymph node involved. Breast cancer.

I went through all the routine tests. I had a lumpectomy and an axillary dissection (the removal of as many lymph nodes as possible). There were good margins on the mass taken from my breast and with 8 rounds of chemo, 30 hits of radiation to breast and under arm and a year of Herceptin (my pathology was er/pr- which meant the tumour was not fed by hormones, and Her2+ which meant the tumour over expressed Her2 neu gene which indicated an aggressive form of the cancer that affects 25% of breast cancer patients). I now count myself as a 4 year and counting thriver. I prefer the term thriver to survivor. To thrive means to live. To survive gives me the feeling that I am hanging on to a thread, gasping to keep living. I prefer to think of myself as living this life I’ve been given.

As with most cancer patients I questioned the why. Why did this happen to me? What made this happen? Why did I develop cancer? And I learned through all of the “why” that there is no answer and there is no need for an answer to that question. It happens.

Not long ago someone asked me if I thought that I had done something to cause my breast cancer. I was able to answer an emphatic no. How could I cause something like this? Breast cancer happens for a variety of reasons that all have to do with biology and science. It is a mutation in cells within the body. I am not a scientist and scientists have been working on this disease for many years. If there was a specific reason or a specific thing that we did to cause breast cancer, I think by now we would know that and the cure would be at hand.

There are lists of “possible” causes or contributing factors to developing breast cancer. This list has been produced by cancer research organizations and support agencies. Is what they say true? I’m not convinced that it is. Every October magazines and publications list “things you can do to prevent breast cancer”. I see this as a placebo to prevent panic and to make us feel that perhaps we can do something to stop breast cancer in its tracks. It’s lovely to think that this would be possible and yet I have met many women on this journey who lived clean healthy lives. They exercised regularly, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink alcohol, watched what they ate and yet they had breast cancer. Some of them much more serious and advanced than mine. We can do everything “right” and still develop the disease. Does this explain the number of women who are being diagnosed in their 20s and 30s? These young women haven’t lived enough to have created any of the list of possiblilities.

I lived a good life. I looked at the list when I was given all the information and pamphlets upon diagnosis and worried that I was responsible when I could put a check mark beside two of the “possible” factors. There I was, already frightened that I was going to die, and now I was blaming myself for causing this to happen. Giving this kind of information to people who are now fast tracked to perhaps the end of the line is like saying “well, if only you had done this or hadn’t done that you would still be further back in the line.” How cruel! I was making myself feel even worse than I already did. At that moment I threw that particular pamphlet into the trash can and determined then and there that this was not my fault, that this had happened and I was going to fight back. I told myself that cancer had picked the wrong chick to mess with and that I was still me, I was not my pathology, I was not the statistics (which by the way are usually about 5 years behind at any time) and I was not going to allow myself or anyone else to tell me how this was going to play out.

What I knew was that I had been living a stress filled life for too many years. I had had other health issues crop up from time to time which I had always been able to closely link with stress. Did I learn from my previous experiences? Obviously not if I was being hammered over the head with a cancer diagnosis to wake my mind up to the fact that I was putting my immune system at risk. So I lowered my stress level and have been able to keep stress out of my life.

Did stress cause my breast cancer? Not directly though I would say it played a large part in the chemical makeup of my body and it impaired my immune system. Having done that, it opened the door for the cells to run rampant through my body and the “code” in my system was jeopardized. So I learned to treat my body with more respect and that I needed to be sure my mind, my body and my spirit were working in tandem.

Why did I get breast cancer? Why does anyone get breast cancer…we have two breasts. This applies to men as well as women. While men make up a small percentage of those who develop breast cancer they do. Two breasts, that’s all it takes. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

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