April 26 is a big anniversary for me. I celebrate 13 years as a cancer survivor .
That date is as seared in my mind as my children’s birth dates! Every cancer survivor has a story, and this is mine in short.
When the call came from my ob-gyn’s office that the radiologist suggested further imaging after my annual mammogram, I was assured by several friends that that was pretty standard procedure for women my age. I tried to dismiss my anxieties. After all, I had just had a physical and had been declared the picture of health.
This was during the days I published a monthly Christian lifestyle magazine. I had begun a little research ten days earlier on an article dealing with how women of faith deal with breast cancer.
Do card-carrying Christian women struggle in the face of losing their two very worldly outward signs of femininity – their hair and their breasts?
Why in the world did I think up that subject at that time in the first place?
After several e-mail and telephone conversations with oncologist surgeon Dr. Phillip Ley, he invited me to his office to don a white coat and follow him around talking to some of his patients he knew were leaning hard on their faith.
When I arrived that afternoon, I mentioned my second round of imaging and confessed to a twinge of anxiety.
He went to his computer, keyed in my social security number and found the results of my previous day’s test. It said, “biopsy recommended.” I was shaken to the core.
Dr. Ley assured me that only 13 percent of women who had whatever it was my mammogram showed actually had a malignancy.
Completely sensitive to my obvious meltdown, he offered to arrange for me to go that very second for a biopsy. I accepted his kind offer. Forget pre-certification. I wanted to know.
Two days after my near collapse in his office, I heard the words Invasive Lobular Carcinoma.
My first questions were, “Will I die?” and “Will I lose my hair?”
My brain and my emotions were just all over the place. Oh how I wish I had said something wise and holy that “Christian magazine ladies” ought to say in such moments, but I did not. I was terrified.
I could stand there all day and read statistics about the strides that had been made in tackling the disease.
That is all well and good, but when a doctor looked me in the eye and said, “I’m sorry but you have cancer,” those numbers became very personal.
I had immediately gone from concerned spectator to cancer patient. And it was sickening and frightening and everything in between.
Somewhere I read that having cancer is a lot like being in love— when you have it, it is all you can think about.
It is a superstitious saying that “bad things come in threes.” It did seem that way at the time. It was not a good year to work Breast Cancer into my life.
Cancer was complicating a life that was already quite complicated. I had just launched a new business with my staff of two, one of whom was me! I was also going through a very sad divorce after a 35 year marriage.
A very short week later, I found myself scheduled for a bi-lateral mastectomy with what Dr. Ley called “immediate reconstruction.” What a term.
There was nothing “immediate” about it, and until 2006 my only frame of reference for the word reconstruction involved the period of time immediately following the Civil War.
As anyone who has ever met cancer up close and personal will testify, it becomes quite a drawn out journey. After you have it, you tend to divide your life into two parts—B.C. and A.C.
After the surgery which totally took the wind out of my sails, I was merely on the first leg of this journey.
I had to meet the oncologist and hear about a recommended treatment plan. She advised eight rounds of chemotherapy.
The side effects she described scared me even more than surgery!
Dr. Ley encouraged me to have a sample of my tissue sent to a lab in California that was on the cutting edge of genetic testing.
It was all very new, and no one in Mississippi was doing it routinely at the time. Insurance companies were not paying for it, but my insurance company was a nightmare anyway.
The EOBs they were sending told me they were not paying for anything anyway, so what was a few more thousand dollars at that point? I thought I was going to be in debt over my head the rest of my life anyway!
The test could assess the likelihood of disease recurrence and the effectiveness of chemotherapy in improving the timeline.
I trusted Dr. Ley, but I was just overwhelmed with too much advice from well-meaning friends and family. I was confused and in great need of a sign from God himself!
And out of the blue…the very next day a close friend brought me an article her husband had seen in the Wall Street Journal that week about the very genetic tests Dr. Ley had recommended.
The article said that this was a huge breakthrough in breast cancer research and would spare thousands of early stage cancer patients from needless chemotherapy. It was already protocol in other places.
I took that as my answer to prayer. I should send the tissue and have the test. And so I did. Bottom line—I was in that group of women who would derive no benefit from chemotherapy. My chance of recurrence was almost nil even without chemo.
I tell you this story for several reasons – not the least is that I reaped the benefit of a remarkable and brand new tool in breast cancer treatment.
But I tell you also to remind you that the God of the Ages is still listening to our prayers and working in the details of our lives.
James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault and it will be given to him.” And all God’s people say, “Amen!”
