About You

This is me – Beatis. I am one of the moderators on this blog.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2007. For me, standard treatment has always been the only option, but I know not everyone makes this choice and I too have been asked to consider trying the alternative route.

What I would like on this page is your own stories on how you fared with conventional cancer treatment, either through comments on this page or links to your own blog or forums you are a member of.  I’ll kick things off by telling my own story here. 

Shedding some weight

After more than 30 years of weighing the pros and the cons, I had finally come to the conclusion that one can indeed have too much of a good thing and that the time had come at last for me to have a breast reduction. The operation was done on 9 October 2007 and all went well; I had no pain and hardly any discomfort and my only regret was not having it done earlier.

Cancer

I was planned for a check up on 22 October 2007. When I entered her office the plastic surgeon introduced me to a nurse practitioner and told me that cancer was found in the tissue of my left breast, as well as quite a considerable spread of DCIS.

The tumour they had found was still small: 1.1 cm radius. That was a positive thing. That there was so much DCIS was not. Both DCIS and tumour were grade III with high MA index. Hormone receptor negative, which was not so good, HER2 status negative, which was a little good again.

All this meant simply that my breast had to come off. Because of my breast reduction, sentinel lymph node examination to see if the cancer had spread, was no longer possible, so I needed lymph node dissection as well. They expected to remove about 10 lymph nodes, which would then be examined for metastases. I was scheduled for a meeting with a surgeon oncologist that Wednesday.

The plastic surgeon and the NP were very sweet. They hugged me and took ample time to comfort me and answer what questions I had. I didn’t have many though, I was dumbstruck. They gave me a folder with a stack of brochures on breast cancer and treatments. They gave me tea and biscuits. The NP dialled by husbands phone number for me, for I couldn’t; I felt dead calm but my fingers didn’t work and I couldn’t operate my phone.

My husband came to pick me up from the hospital, crying and miserable. We hardly said a word on the way home. I could only think of him and how upset he was and how to break it to my daughter, my poor girl. I needn’t have worried. She was upset of course, she cried for a few days and from then on she was only wonderful all the time.

Fear and hope

I was very scared. I have seen people very close to me die of cancer and I knew that when cancer has spread beyond the lymph nodes, it usually means you’re done for. I also knew that no alternative therapy has any efficacy when it comes to curing cancer. Therefore there has never been a doubt in my mind that I would follow standard treatment.

At home I devoured all the brochures that were given to me until I practically knew them by heart. I scoured the internet for information on breast cancer and found they would probably advise me to take an adjuvant chemotherapy, which in fact they did.  I called a few knowledgeable friends about possible treatments, new research and the truth of alternative treatments claiming to be able to cure cancer. I just wanted to be sure of having  my facts straight.

We wrote down the questions we wanted put to the surgeon oncologist that Wednesday. Then I tried to put the matter out of my mind, which of course I couldn’t.

I remember vividly sitting on the couch in the living room that afternoon and thinking: there is nothing more wonderful than this life, my own ordinary life, with my family, my friends, my pets, my job; it’s all I want and all I need for being happy and I’ll do anything, absolutely anything within reason to keep it.

It’s funny how the mind works, like the way certain things stand out in memory. I will never forget what a beautiful day it was, the 22^nd  of October, probably the most beautiful day in one of the most beautiful autumns in years. I had to go by train to the nearest town, where the hospital was. I decided to walk to the hospital from the station, about an hour and a half. I so enjoyed the walk, the crisp fresh weather, the sunshine, the intense blue of the sky, the colours of the trees, the beauty of the city. 

Another image that is engraved in my memory is the first night after my mastectomy on 9 November 2007. It had been a very cloudy, bleak day. I had dozed off and when I woke up it was dark and the sky had cleared up completely. From the 10^th floor where I lay I had a breathtaking view of the city and the starry sky above. I remember feeling happy and peaceful; after my operation they had told me that the preliminary examination had shown my lymph nodes to be clear, my breast had come off; perhaps there was a chance I would be lucky after all. 

Ten days after my operation all the results were in. The lymph nodes were definitely clear, but the cancer was a very fast growing and they had found two other small tumours in the tissue, which I found quite scary. They advised adjuvant chemotherapy, as I had expected.

Chemo and statistics

We asked the oncologist what it would do for my prognosis. He said: an average of 5 to 7 % improvement on total 10-year survival. Why so little? Because it’s given to destroy metastases that are too small for detection, he said. We don’t know if you have them, for we can’t see them. Many women don’t need the chemo, but we don’t know precisely who they are.

He explained about relative and absolute improvement. He explained that the percentage is based on all women receiving adjuvant chemo. However, if you don’t have micrometastases, the chemo will do nothing for your prognosis.  But for the women who do have them, the chemo may enhance their personal prognosis much more, depending on the stage of the cancer. In general, the more advanced the cancer, the greater the benefit of chemotherapy.

Would he do it himself? He would, he said. In fact, his wife had, at his advice, when she had breast cancer. She was doing fine now. He showed us a picture of her, with his children, three boys, who were still young. 

There’s a good chance you were in time, the oncologist said. But I hadn’t been anywhere. I hadn’t done anything. I now had the luck I so wanted, but I felt sad somehow too, because of so many others who were not so lucky.

I also thought of two women I knew with early breast cancer who had decided to forgo standard therapy to treat their cancer with alternative therapy and had suffered a horrible and untimely death. One of them was the mother of one of my daughter’s class mates at high school. It was these women and what happened to them that ultimately lead to this blog.

Chemotherapy started Friday, 14 December 2007. What can I say – it was bad, but not all bad and not all of the time. I had lots of pills to stop me from being sick and I made good use of them. After the first round I became very sick on Sunday. Monday morning it was even worse, so I called the NP and she arranged for extra medication to be delivered. I was able to walk our dogs for an hour that same afternoon. The first week after chemo I felt bad, there was a huge, foul-tasting lump in my stomach that made me feel on the verge of throwing up the whole time, but in the following two weeks I always felt much better.

Hair: to have and not to have

On Christmas-eve we were watching a movie on television: Shoot to Kill, with Kirstie Alley. I remember the tartan shirt she wore. Whenever I see a tartan now, I think of my hair, for that was when it started to come off. It had been looking funny for the past days, brittle, dull and colourless. And then all of a sudden I sat with a bunch of hair in my hand. I think my hair has started to come off, I said to my husband. What do you think? He thought so too and was very upset for me. I called my sister and said: my hair is coming off. She cried. Don’t cry, I said, you’ll make me cry too and I don’t want to. It will come back. When spring is here, my hair will come back. We all decided to just think of that – my hair coming back in spring.

I had already bought a number of hats and shawls. The day after Christmas I went to the hair salon, my husband along for support and had my hair cropped very short. He said it looked nice, but I wasn’t so sure. I put on one of my new hats and we went home. At first my daughter didn’t want to look at it, but finally her curiosity got the better of her. She said: you look just like a lesbian! And like grandpa too! Well, thanks for nothing. We laughed until we nearly fainted.

I had decided I would not wear a wig. The wigs I had tried on, felt very uncomfortable and I felt I just couldn’t be bothered for those few months. Hardly any of the women I met during chemo wore wigs by the way. One of them told me she had only worn her wig two or three times because it was so itchy and irritating. After that, it had been sitting idly on its stand in the bedroom and eventually ended up in the dressing-up chest of her grandchildren.

Just after my operation I found it very hard to look at my chest. Not so much because of the breast that was no longer there, but because of the wound, which looked horrific at first. But I looked anyway, right from the first day and so did my husband. It looked very scary at first, but you see it improving every day, which is nice. Now the scar is hardly visible.

I thought I looked horrible with no hair, but I looked at it anyway once a day. I made myself. I wanted to get used to it and somehow I did.

When I felt good, I put on some make-up, a nice shawl or hat and we would go out, my husband and I having a nice dinner somewhere, or shopping with my daughter and my sister with her children, having lunch together, all very cosy.

I worried what it would do to my sister, me having cancer. We have a small family and depend upon each other very much. But she was wonderful, she gave me such tremendous support, she rose to the occasion and was an absolute rock.

I expected losing my hair would make me hysterical. I met a woman in the hospital who said she had cried for a whole week and was still not quite over it after 3 weeks. But I didn’t become hysterical and I didn’t cry either. The only thing I could hardly bear was the itching of the hairs coming off. I stuck my head under the tap several times a day to rub off the lose hairs.

I don’t consider myself a very brave person. I always thought I would never be able to cope with things like chemotherapy and cancer and I wasn’t assuming that I’d be particularly brave by any stretch of the imagination. But when it’s your turn, you just do what you have to do. I had sore eyes, blisters in my mouth, I was very, very tired and I felt very miserable at times. But I stuck with it and was happy nonetheless and still had fun. 

Starting over

And then suddenly it was over and we all started waiting for my hair to come back. It didn’t, of course. I stood in front of the mirror every day, scrutinizing my head, but nothing happened. It’s not coming back, I told my husband, it should have started by now, I’ll be bald for ever!

Just after new-year I got my prosthesis and bought a stack of new – and quite pretty – bras. I don’t think I’ll have a reconstruction. I’ve grown quite attached to my chicken fillet and most of the time I don’t even notice it’s there at all.

My hair decided to come back after all and 12 May 2008 I took off my hat for the last time. We were at my sister’s that day when this picture was taken. I liked the colour so much that I decided not to dye it anymore. It feels good having my own hair colour. 

It’s strange, looking back on that time. It was, as they say, the worst of times, but also the best of times. So many people were so absolutely wonderful, my family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, the doctors and the nurses. All in all, I think I have been extremely lucky. And I have made some great new friends through my illness: Wilma, Marer, Crypto, Edward, jli, WeWee, Natalie. Here’s to you guys, la’chaim!