A new Goal

Chemo, as you can imagine sucks. I was tired, nauseated and sore. Food lost its taste, I remember eating strawberries and I couldn’t even tell that they were sweet. But with each chemo treatment you know you are getting closer to the end and that it is more than worth it. I continued to work through chemo as much as was possible, luckily I had an amazing boss who was understanding and so good to work with me. My husband always came with me to my treatments. We would play Connect Four or Dao, which was of course my idea, who knows why; Maybe because I enjoy loosing ;/ I certainly didn’t have the brain power to win very often. I loved that he was always there with me. A person couldn’t ask for a more amazing partner. Chris and I literally fit together like puzzle pieces. He is the yin to my yang. I could ramble on with all of the cliché metaphors to describe our relationship but the bottom line is we have the kind of love that most people only dream of and what is better than that is we both know how lucky we are to have each other. As we sat through one of my treatments I looked at him and said, “I am going to be a nurse.”  I had thought about being a nurse before, I had been a Nurse assistant (that is actually how my husband and I met, my husband is a nurse) and it is a natural progression to become a nurse, but I never felt like I was science smart. I never thought I could manage that kind of school. Most of my life has been spent on the right side of my brain. My first degree is in fashion. I always thought of myself as an artist. But suddenly it was like a complete shift in my mind. All of the fear I had about getting through school to become a nurse, disappeared. It wasn’t a thought of, ‘Maybe I will be a nurse’ it was, ‘I am going to be a nurse.’ This gave me a new sense of life after cancer. I was going to be a nurse.

You can pretend, but you can't hide

I met my oncologist on Halloween. We spent a couple of hours with him asking every question imaginable. He was amazing and patient. We talked about how chemo has become much more personalized to each patient. He basically said they were going to throw the book at me. The number of lymph nodes involved, my young age, the aggressiveness of my tumor made everyone nervous. But with that said he discussed everything we were going to do to kick ass and said if we followed this aggressive treatment plan he believed my chances of recurrence were about 15%. We showed up late to our Halloween get together.  Halloween (if you don’t know me well) is my absolute favorite holiday.   I had made an adorable duck costume for my daughter but I hadn’t even made a costume for myself. This was the first time in years that I wasn’t going to dress up, but I am happy to say I pulled something together at the last minute. (The Halloween that I don’t at least dress up you will know things aren’t going well.) Chemo Started in November. One week before my daughter’s 1^st birthday. My sweet mother had come down to help out. I had planned a dinner party for Makena’s birthday. My mother and I went to Costco to pick up groceries for the party. We were about to check out when my mother realized she had forgotten something. I waited at the front with my daughter in the cart when I started to feel dizzy and nauseous. I started to feel hot and clammy, all the noises around me became distant, and I couldn’t see straight, I felt like my legs were going to buckle beneath me. My mom came back and we went to the checkout line. I could barely hear the checker as I paid my bill. I stood there silent as my mom checked out when I realized this wasn’t getting better and my mom asked me if I was ok. I think I was seconds from passing out when I sat down on Costco’s floor. I started getting my hearing back and began feeling better. But they still made me take a wheel chair out. I was so embarrassed. But it made me realized that all of this crap was real. I had cancer and I was going to have to deal with that.

For those we Love

A few weeks after my surgery I lost a good friend to her battle with Breast Cancer. This beautiful woman, we will call her Lynn, was someone you couldn’t help looking up to.  Someone you loved to be around. And despite the fact that we only saw each other a few times a year I cared deeply about her. But more than just the things that made her wonderful were the things that connected us. We both battled Crohn’s   disease, we both were diagnosed with breast cancer when our daughters were very young, but my favorite connection is that we both love to sew; and our favorite thing to do is sew things for other people. For the sole purpose of the feeling you get when you sew a dress for a little girl and she can’t stop smiling because she feels like a princess. It was these things that made us so similar that made her funeral so difficult to attend. I sat in the church pew with surgery drains still painfully in place. I cried for the loss of a dear friend as well as for the fear of what lay ahead for me. As those closest to Lynn began o tell stories of her life I realized these stories were my stories. It wasn’t just an illusion, my husband felt it too.  At the grave site my father in-law (one of the sweetest men on the face of the earth) hugged me so tight it hurt. I lost it, I had to step away to compose myself. Lynn never complained, at least not in public anyway. I wanted to fight my battle with the courage that she had. As I sit here typing I still try to muster up the strength that she had. I am grateful to have known her and my life was blessed to have her example. May we always remember those who went before us and strive to live in such a way that would make them proud.

Decisions, Decisions...

I t is hard to convey, unless you have had a similar experience, what it feels like to be told you have cancer. It is of course terrifying, but there is so much to do and so many decisions to make that you are quickly taken from fear to a place of business like proficiency. Due to my young age and my family history of breast cancer the first decision we made was to get genetic testing. It came back that I had a BRCA2 gene mutation. This led to my second decision which was to have a bilateral mastectomy. Being 27 and having people suggest that you have both of your breast removed is horrifying. And if you have the inclination to get on the internet and look at mastectomy and breast reconstruction results it becomes even more terrifying. Luckily I have an amazing husband who has stood by me through all of life’s challenges, and he was my rock through this one. I made the decision to remove both breasts because I didn’t want to go through this horrendous experience again and my gene mutation made the likelihood of a 2^nd breast cancer a real possibility. We met with a plastic surgeon and discussed all of my reconstruction options. I decided to use my own fat from my stomach to reconstruct my breast. This option didn’t use any of my muscles (which is a common reconstructive option) and it was my own fat so if I gained weight than my breasts would too. We couldn’t do this immediately so he coordinated surgery with my mastectomy surgeon and when she was done he placed tissue expanders. These would prepare my skin for the reconstruction surgery that we would do after all of my treatments were finished. Surgery left me with nerve damage and the inability to lift my left arm above my shoulder. (I had to have physical therapy to get it back) Also during the surgery they removed lymph nodes and it reviled that the cancer I had spread to five lymph nodes; this meant that my cancer was staged three. But all I was thinking was that I was going to kick it ass.   Bring on the treatment because I want to get this over with and move on with my life.

The first Time Around

My Mother had breast cancer when I was twelve. Twelve is old enough to understand the possible implications of this terrifying disease but not emotionally old enough to process it. My mother survived, thank God, and is still doing well. It had always occurred to me that I needed to be aware and watch out for breast cancer in my future but it never occurred to me that I would have to face breast cancer at 27. Six weeks after I stopped breast feeding my then ten month old daughter I was lying in bed and felt a hard lump in my left breast. I looked at my husband and said, “What the hell is this?” both of us immediately knew it was breast cancer but of course this is not what we told each other. “Maybe it is just a clogged milk duct but we better have it checked out,” was my husband’s reply. We went on a camping trip that weekend that had been planned for months. It was a wonderful trip but literally every five minutes I found myself feeling the lump in my breast imagining the possibility of what it was. That Monday we went to see my doctor; she scheduled an ultrasound for the next day. At the ultrasound the tech assured me it was probably just a cyst. But when the radiologist came in he said he wasn’t sure what it was. “It doesn’t scream cancer, cancer is often obvious like a 6’5” transvestite walking down main street.” He decided to do a mammogram and then changed his tone. “Megan, I hate to say it but this looks like cancer.”  We did a biopsy the next day; my 27^th birthday. Yah, Happy birthday to me. The results came back, it was cancer.