Chapter One....

“There is nothing the body suffers which the soul may not profit by” -George Meredith


I wish I could have breathed a sigh of relief as I walked out of my doctor's office that rainy spring afternoon in 2007, but I was still full of fear. I had gone in for a mammography after noticing a “dimpling” on my left breast. When I first saw this gathering of skin my reaction was: “Cellulite? On my breast? Do they have machines at the gym to deal with this?” However, after checking the Internet, I learned it was a sign of breast cancer. My thoughts started racing and in a state of panic I rushed in to see my doctor. Her words “everything on the mammography looks normal -you don’t have breast cancer” were empty to me, for somehow I knew deep inside that everything was not normal. The moment I got into my car I grabbed my cell phone, immediately dialing the number of another specialist for a second opinion. My fingers trembled, yet I was filled with determination.

The doctor I saw for a second opinion didn’t think anything was wrong either, but he did take the precaution of referring me for a sonogram. The next morning, I was lying on a table covered with white paper, the discomfort caused by the cold gel slathered on my breast was nothing compared to the fear in my heart. The doctor was scanning both breasts, but kept coming back to a certain quadrant. As she silently stared at the screen she said, “I see something” and immediately performed a needle biopsy. While I would have to wait a few days for the results, she basically told me that she believed it was cancer. She also sent me for an MRI – and wrote on the referral slip that the sonogram results were “highly suspicious of malignancy”.

As I walked to my car, I keep looking at the slip it and felt a wave of dizziness each time I read the word “malignancy”. If not for the fact that I had to drive home, I am sure I would have collapsed in the parking lot. It took a few minutes for it to actually sink in, then the tears came and my body felt numb. I drove home and tried to figure out how to break this news to my mother. I did not want to upset her, but knew that she was the one who would understand exactly what I was going through.

This whole situation was so eerily familiar to what she went through two years earlier. During the summer of 2005, she had visited several doctors complaining of a discomfort in her breast area, only to be repeatedly told, “everything was fine”. After taking it upon herself to check her symptoms on the Internet, she discovered that her symptoms matched those of IBC – inflammatory breast cancer – the most aggressive and deadly forms of breast cancer and this was confirmed by a biopsy. While her experience was shocking and horrific at the time, it also planted that seed inside my head that was pushing me forward. I knew that “everything is probably fine” was not a medical term that I could live with.

After my own diagnosis in 2007, the initial shock eventually wore off and a deep resolve set in. My vocabulary became full of terms I never even wanted to think about and I joined a support group I never wanted to be a member of. I reached out to others who had gone through this before me and I was determined to beat this. The surgery took place about two weeks later and the doctor was pleased with the results of the lumpectomy. Discussions then turned to treatment options – chemotherapy and/or radiation. I was overwhelmed with the choices, especially in light of the conflicting opinions I was receiving. In the end, I decided upon radiation and began six weeks of treatment and was put on a tamoxifen, a drug to prevent a recurrence of the cancer.

I followed up every six months with a mammography, sonogram or MRI and each time was given a clean bill of health. I was continuously reassured by all of my doctors that the cancer had been caught early and that I would be just fine. But I was skeptical, especially after what my mother and I had both gone through. On top of that, I had also just lost the man I loved to bladder cancer – he had been diagnosed in April of 2008 (and told “we got it early”), only to find out that it had spread to his adrenal glands. He died six months after his diagnosis. This disease not only made me skeptical, it scared the hell out of me.