Lisa Miller
Dr. Sonia Apgar Begert
English 101
29 January 2013
How I Learned To Live
In life, there are times we face certain situations or challenges that cause us to pause and examine the course of our lives, giving us the opportunity to live our lives differently and hopefully for the better. Not long ago I faced one such challenge.
On a day like any other day, I went about getting the kids to school and went to take a shower and get on with all that I needed to do for that day. As I showered, I felt a funny bump about the size of a hard pea between my right armpit and breast. I did not think it was a big deal, but it was a bit weird so I went to the doctor to have it checked out. I had hoped they would say it was nothing, not to worry. Instead, they sent me to have an ultrasound. A few days later I went in for a biopsy. I do not know how to describe how I already knew that it was breast cancer, I just did. Everyone that I had told was sure it was nothing, it will all be fine. Two days later I was in the doctors office with my two friends waiting for the results. As my doctor told me that I did in fact have breast cancer, I just sat there. What do you do? What do you say when you have just been told you have cancer? My friend to the left of my held my hand and cried. My friend on my right asked the questions. I sat there speechless, yet already knowing.
I was 39, young for a breast cancer diagnosis. I had no family history of breast cancer or any other form of cancer for that matter. Three weeks before this my husband had filed for divorce. I had two small children, aged 8 and 11. We were in the middle of a major remodel; our 90 year old house was jacked up so that we could pour a proper foundation and update all of the plumbing and electrical. We were living in the one bedroom apartment above our garage. Outside our yard and driveway were nothing but mud as everything was torn up by work trucks bringing materials and we were preparing for new landscaping. Needless to say, the whole of my life felt as though it were coming apart. How I described that time in my life is that it felt like someone had put all of my life in a brown paper bag, shook it up, dumped it out and said, "ok now put it back together".
Fortunately my breast cancer diagnosis is one that is very treatable. I had stage 1 invasive ductal carcinoma with no cancer in my lymph nodes. The tumor itself was estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor positive which meant that it used these two hormones to grow. Which meant that my treatment options were very good. I had surgery to remove the tumor and at the time of the surgery they dissected the lymph nodes closest to the tumor and found that they were cancer-free. A sample of the tumor was sent away and tested to determine the likelihood of reoccurrence. The results came back very good; only a 7% chance that the same cancer would return. This test helps to determine recommendations for treatment. Because my risk of reoccurrence was so low, chemotherapy was not recommended. After I had healed from my surgery, I underwent seven weeks of radiation therapy and began taking tamoxifen, which acts as an estrogen blocker in breast tissue, a hormone therapy that I would take for five years. Though there are side effects I was able to deal with them without much hassle.
The first day of radiation therapy I sat in the patient waiting area wearing one of those really ugly hospital gowns. As I looked around, I noticed just how ugly the waiting room was, nothing warm, inviting or happy. It just reminds you that you are sick. Because radiation is every weekday for a several weeks, you tend to have appointments at the same time each day, waiting with the same people who are also waiting for their appointment. The woman that I waited with had Alzheimer's. Day three of this waiting room experience I looked at my friend who was with me and said, "I can't do this, this is depressing, I have enough to be depressed about, I don't need more". I determined to think of a way to make this experience doable. My friend and I had used a lot of laughter up to this point, but I was wearing thin. As I laid on the radiation table, contemplating my alternatives for making treatment bearable, I came up with a plan. I would bring a party with me several times a week. I would bring the happy and give myself something good and fun to think about.
The first time was the funniest as the radiation technicians treating me were unsuspecting. I had decided to do themes and with each theme I would wear sort of a costume under my hospital gown and bring food for the staff that matched the theme. I had to keep things simple because I need to easily take the costume off and receive my treatment. The first theme was naughty housewife. I had baked a coffee cake and went into the treatment room and put down my things, I slipped off my robe and turn to face the technicians holding my cake in a provocative stance in my naked girl body apron. They laughed so hard. I had the desired effect; we had a party. I brought in a party three times a week, soon all of the staff in the department were walking by the treatment room during my appointment time to see what I had brought. This gave me something positive to focus on and cheered many other people as well.
Even though I had figured out a way to go through treatment in a way that felt good to me, I still need to sort out the rest of my life. As I looked at the pieces that came out of the paper bag, the question that I was struck by was: did I want the same life that I had been living put back together? I knew that I wanted to live, I knew that I wanted the best for my children, but what is it to live? As I exercised on my elliptical trainer, I had an ah-hah moment. I considered a good long life to be eighty-plus years of which I was on thirty-nine, so roughly half. As I looked back over the first half, which had had a lot of turmoil, I determined that I did not want the remaining forty to be the same as the previous. I needed to change how I lived. Though I knew that I would survive cancer, I wanted to do more than survive, I want to live, to really live. Yet, I needed to determine just what that meant. What does it mean to really live? I reasoned that one thing that it meant was to be intentional. How many times do we say “someday”? I needed to decide how to turn someday into today. I made a list of all of the things that I had been talking about learning and wanting to do, the places I wanted to see, people I wanted to visit or connect with and hung it by my computer in my home office. This keeps me mindful of those things and when I see an opportunity to do one of them, I seize it. I try to do one of the items on that list between scans, which until recently was every six months. I try to keep a mixture of both big and small things. As I do one of the items, I lightly draw a line through it. I love to see all of the things that I have done. The list has included knitting an afghan for myself, walking along the beach out to the lighthouse at the Dungeness Spit in Sequim, being in a dance performance, going back to school, canning jam, going to yellowstone with my family and learning to fly fish. To celebrate my being five years cancer free, my new husband, kids and I toured Norway this past summer.
Though I would never wish cancer on any one and would have preferred not to have had cancer, I have chosen to see this as an opportunity to do life differently. I choose to live. Not just in the biological sense, but take things in, enjoy, be intentional, explore, take risks. Cancer for me became an opportunity to learn to live.
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