Off My Chest

Chapter Two

The Dreaded C-Word

A very wise person once said, “When life gives you more than you can stand, kneel.” Breast cancer—the dreaded C-word—was about to bring me to my knees.

During the phone call, the doctor kept her diagnosis in scientific terms. She explained that I had been diagnosed with IDC—“Infiltrating Ductal Carcinoma”—which she described as the most common form of breast cancer, occurring in 80 percent of all diagnoses.

I listened to every word, frozen in disbelief. The diagnosis hit me with the force of a hurricane, confirming my worst fears. Cancer. The word no one ever wants to hear from a doctor, had been delivered to me in a matter-of-fact, and non-emotional way. As she spoke, I felt the tears welling up, ready to pour out. Yet as I hung up the phone, my hands trembling, I felt an unexpected freedom. All my doubts and uncertainties had been erased. I no longer had to worry about what was coming because it was here, and I was still standing. Suddenly I became very calm. At least now I know what I’m dealing with, I thought. Now I could come up with a plan, a course of action to fight this curse that threatened to rob me of the life I knew and the family I loved. Another temporary foothold in the terrifying fall that had sent me reeling just a few days earlier.

As I wandered home from the lake, via a different route, I allowed the doctor’s words to churn in my head. I was so lost in my thoughts that as I came upon a large commotion on the street in front of the famed Riviera Theatre, I didn’t even stop to watch the world-famous singer who was dancing on the hood of a shiny, colorful, old sports car singing his heart out pre-concert, to hundreds of screaming, excited, and pushy young fans. I passed through the frenzied crowd like a ghost. The singer’s fame was meaningless to me and so was all the adoration. I probably would have found it all quite thrilling less than a week ago. Now it was just noise.

I stopped by my neighbor Marie’s house, five down the street from my own, where my hopeful husband and my blissfully-unaware girls would be expecting me to join in our normal evening routine. I had already called Marie from the lake, sharing my grim news, asking if I could drop by. I needed to sit silently with my dear friend on her front porch swing and watch the beautiful spring sun set slowly behind our city neighborhood. Life as we knew it was going to change soon enough. Breaking the devastating news to my husband was going to be beyond heart-wrenching. I just need to spare us both the pain, I thought, for a little while longer. I wasn’t ready to cast my precious family and everyone I loved most into the nightmare I was now living.

As Marie and I sat hushed on her porch, I took a moment to call my plastic surgeon, who had given me his emergency cell phone number after I called him from the biopsy room to tell him what was going on. I needed to cancel the implant replacement surgery that was scheduled for a few days later. He, too, had wrongly assumed that what they were seeing was going to turn out to be nothing but scarring from the failed implant procedures over the last four years.

Before I hung up the phone, he warned me to go “full guns a-blazing on this,” and “make sure you spray for weeds.” He shared that we were both the same age and not to take this condition lightly, given the fact that I was only 41 and a mother of three young girls.

After the call, the details began to buzz in my brain, and I felt the first bursts of panic. Leaving Marie’s porch, a new fear had replaced the old ones in my head: Now I needed to go home, and tell my husband.

Dylan was pacing outside on the bluestone patio of our fenced backyard when I arrived home. He was on the phone, talking with a family member. The girls were inside. Thank God, I thought. I walked out our back door and down the long and narrow grey painted porch that ran along the large addition we had built on the back of the house. Hearing my footsteps, Dylan looked up and saw me.

Our eyes met. My throat tightened. I barely managed to get the words out.

“I have it,” I said.

The words left/flew/escaped from my lips. In the hush that followed, I knew they were shattering both of our lives and could never be taken back.

Dylan stared, then hung up the phone. The shock on his face said it all as he winced and swallowed hard.

“You do?” he asked in disbelief. ”What did they say?”

I sighed, then told him. My heart broke as our world crumbled in his eyes.

It was the most intense moment I’d ever experienced with Dylan. For minutes we stood alone in the darkened back yard. I could see he was worried and barely coping. Looking anxiously toward the house, we decided we’d tell the girls another time.

Yet that decision to hold the truth inside haunted me. Later that night, I found myself running across the street to our neighbor Roxanne’s house, knocking on her door, and disturbing the family’s evening TV time. Roxanne was in her sixties, and a tough, well-known divorce attorney in the city. She was one of the most fabulous, inspiring, older women I knew, although I didn’t know her that well at the time. Several years back her husband had whispered to my husband that Roxanne had breast cancer. Knocking at her door now, I desperately needed the assurance of talking to someone who had walked in my shoes and survived.

As I waited outside, I could see my girls at an upstairs window across the street, staring curiously at me on Roxanne’s front porch on this cold, dark, May spring evening. What must be going through their minds?

I was greeted by Roxanne’s surprised but smiling face. Warmly she invited me inside. Sharing my news, she didn’t seem surprised. “Everyone gets it!” she exclaimed. I told her my story, told her my feelings, and to my relief she understood. “As a young mother, you should do chemo,” she advised, holding my hand. “I didn’t because I am older, my kids are grown, and I’ve never been in the bottom 30% percent of anything my whole life!” That was the percentage Roxanne had been told was her chance of the cancer returning if she skipped chemo and only did radiation. She was willing to take the risk.

As we drank tea at her kitchen banquette, Roxanne’s husband hovered around in the next room, within earshot. In his eyes I could still see his fear for Roxanne. She told me, “You are going to be fine, but you might get depressed.”

I babbled on, expressing fear after fear, Roxanne listening to my every word with compassion. She kept referring to me as “newly diagnosed.” I clearly was a newbie in this woman’s club and still had a tremendous amount to learn, not only about my actual condition but also how to navigate through all the options, tests, and treatments that would be coming my way. Roxanne was very supportive and offered to go to any appointments with me or help in any way she could, but the biggest takeaway I received was her matter-of-fact attitude and overall lack of worry. Her boldness made me want to throw back my head and laugh in the face of my fears.

The next morning I awoke, feeling the dread of what I’d been diagnosed with, and what was to come. I couldn’t shake my desperate thoughts. I’m sick. Maybe even dying. Is this my fault? Did I cause this? Did I bring this disease upon myself? Additionally, I couldn’t imagine how we’d tell the girls.

Later that day, I received a message from Dr. Wyndham, my OB/GYN. “I heard the news. Call me.” Dr. Wyndham had helped guide me through my pregnancies, and then delivered my three babies, so she knew me well—and in an intimate way no one else did. She had represented birth to me and now figuratively was holding my hand as I grappled with death.

During our call, she assured me I could make it through this. “You’ll still be alive and present,” she promised, “as I help deliver your grandbabies.” I told her I wished I had gone for the mammogram she had ordered at my last appointment, eight months ago. “No!” she insisted. “Don’t do that to yourself! They could have missed it then. The good news is they found it now.”

By the time we’d hung up, Dr. Wyndham had referred me to the best doctors at Northwestern, Rush and Evanston, and counseled me on how to proceed and what to expect. I hung on her every word, becoming more and more optimistic. Sure, I have a life-threatening disease, but I can’t give up on my children’s future. It was the powerful visual of being at the birth of my grandchildren that I would cling to in the hard days ahead.

As the fallout from my initial diagnosis began to fade away, a sense of hope and determination replaced it. Fight the fear. Fight the dread, I told myself. Fight that panic of falling, of dropping into an abyss, unable to grab hold of anything to stop yourself from plunging.

My plastic surgeon, Dr. Ito, whom Dr. Wyndham knew, liked, and had originally recommended to me, contacted her about the best breast surgeon he knew at a good but different hospital. She didn’t like the idea of piecing together a team...