A decade after my breast cancer diagnosis, I'm grateful to be here | Local News

Statistics from the American Cancer Society say that 2,370 Kentucky women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year; 580 of them will die from the disease.

As the nurse told me I had joined the statistics, but my knees would not bend. I held onto the sink for balance.

"Am I going to die?" I hoarsely whispered.

"I feel that you are unable to process any additional information," the nurse said.

Cold as it was, she had a point.

I was a 50-year-old single mother with a daughter who was a junior in high school and was a junior at Transylvania University. Would I die before I could see them graduate? Would I meet my daughter-in-law, my son-in-law, my grandchildren?

My children took the news surprisingly well. They could not imagine me dying, or so they told me. But they were shaken in ways they never said. I remember my son at a much-later oncologist's appointment to the doctor: "So she has no cancer in her body? No cancer at all? Anywhere? You're sure?"

I had gone in for a mammogram routine and been summoned pack for additional images. The images showed some suspicious spots that the radiologist wanted to see in a biopsy. But I did not have cancer, he assured me. Nine times out of 10, he said, this kind of image was totally benign.

I opted for a double mastectomy because I never wanted to go through this trauma again. I remember the morning it happened. A male minister was praying with me; as he held my hand and invoked the Lord, he insistently scratched my palm. I was uncomfortable and distressed by his action.

Just before I was in my room, my father, a man who rarely showed emotion, kissed my cheek. I immediately broke down, and then I was sent off into anesthesia.

When I woke up in recovery, I started out in the hospital, and I started to work in the hospital. "You're out in 23 hours, you need to get ready."

I was so groggy I was having trouble putting together sentences, and the first thing I was told that it was costing my insurance too damn much money.

That night about 3 months of age, with a lack of breasts and an assortment of other tubing, I tried to go to the bathroom. No one came. I stood there, with my tubes in my hands and my breasts gone and my shrieking bread just awakened, and I cried.

Then I got on the phone and called my insurer and told them there was no way I could leave the hospital in the next few hours. To my surprise, the insurance company agreed.

After the mastectomy, I had a port surgically embedded in my chest to deliver chemotherapy. I received treatment from a plastic surgeon to my body for reconstruction, to take place after chemotherapy; the cage embedded in my chest was tight, and I never again drew a full satisfying breath until my breast reconstruction. Breast reconstruction was done with tissue harvested from my groin, which yielded a remarkable scalding sensation on awakening after surgery.

I started chemotherapy. This article is only available in French. I wound up keeping a trash can by my couch.

After my double mastectomy, I got a great diagnosis that quickly turned sour: My lymph nodes were clear. The cancer had not spread. Then the pathology report came back: They had found a single calcified lymph node in my breast tissue.

I was going to have chemotherapy. I was not going back to work in just a few weeks. This is how bad it is. "" Cheryl, you can not even be able to go to the bathroom. "

I reported her for her attitude. It seems like a lot of time reporting people during my breast cancer experience. If someone says something inappropriate or you're inappropriate, report them immediately. Breast cancer is bad enough without harassment and demeaning counseling. Also, talk back to your insurance company. Your insurance is there to serve you. You are here to make an insurance company's life.

My chemotherapy consisted of Doxyrubicin, nicknamed "Red Devil" for good reason, and Taxotere. I tell people to beware when you ask doctors for the strongest possible anti-cancer regimen. They will give it to you.

In my case, the drugs left me half-conscious mass negotiating with myself when I would have enough energy to the couch to the mailbox: "Fifteen minutes, and I'I get a drink." "A half-hour, and I'l walk to the bathroom."

I read Anthony Trollope, whose measured cadence and arch observations made me a lifelong fan. I watched "Battlestar Galactica." President Laura Roslin also had breast cancer. She died at the end.

I returned to work in June, having made an unsteady path through my daughter's high school graduation.

But I returned too early. I did not feel like I was at least another six months off, but I did not feel that I could afford to live on disability pay.

I had started receiving weekly transfusions of Herceptin, a targeted therapy for my type of breast cancer. Herceptin is highly thought to be in the breast cancer community and at the University of Kentucky's Markey Cancer Center, and I would have thought it would improve my chances. But Herceptin made me feel as if I had the flu, all day every day.

I was terribly weak, and faking any ability to do actual reporting. One day I wanted to buy food and I did not have enough energy to walk into Kroger.

One workday I heard an editor across the score saying, "If only we had someone to go to Event" X "!" This was my point of view, certainly, I'd go anywhere. What was the deadline? How long should the article be?

I'm going my head at my desk. I was sitting upright in the office, and even that was too hard. On several days, I snuck off into a part of the building, curled up in a ball and fell asleep. I have never been that tired before or since.

Herceptin's pitfalls: heart damage. The damage is real but temporary.

My heart ejection fraction, a measure of how well your heart works, had fallen to a level that led my oncologist to remove me from the drug. We'd just pray that I had received the optimum benefit from the amount of Herceptin I had received, he said, and that my heart would recover.

Meanwhile, lack of exercise had to be put in place to start putting it on a weight that would lead me to soar to a weight of 55 pounds heavier than I was before diagnosis. That weight I was destined for diabetes. Now, I'm on a low-carb diet and have a treadmill in my living room.

Some days I appreciate just how good people can be. P.G. Peeples, the longtime president of the Urban League of Lexington and a fellow breast cancer survivor, called me every few weeks to check in. A neighbor arrived in record time when I had fallen in the bathroom and lost consciousness, awakening to a pool of blood around my head. People are feeling flowers and brought meals.

You do not want to go through breast cancer. But if you are due for a mammogram, do not be in denial. After I started feeling better, I would stop working at Kroger and urge them to get a mammogram. Any time I was in a group, I would usually have a survey of who was up to date on their mammograms. I became a mammogram maniac.

About one in eight American women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in their lifetimes. In 2018, 266,120 will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and another 63,690 with non-invasive breast cancer.

Maybe those who do not get mammograms have read that mammograms are unreliable in detecting breast cancer, or they do not like the mammograms. To women who complain that I'm trying to get rid of my lungs. I'm trying to get rid of me. of the hospital in 23 hours.

That's real bread. A mammogram is a few moments of inconvenience. During my biopsy, I had some pain. My fingernails may have been left in the nurse who was holding my hand during the procedure, which felt like having your breast penetrated by a drill.

The morning I went in for my double mastectomy, I felt great. In reality I was on a path that, if not stopped, would kill me.

Here I am, 10 years later. My daughter is a Peace Corps volunteer in China. My son is a 747 pilot married to a high school teacher with the most generous of spirits.

I wonder what happened to some of the women I put on my journey. I wonder about a woman from Clay City at a "Look Good Feel Better" cosmetics race for breast cancer patients who was on her third round of cancer. And a striking woman I saw at chemotherapy gazing out a window after receiving her chemotherapy, wearing a tan tunic sweater and matching hat. I bought the hat for my head – I still have it – but never found the source for that sweater. Did these ladies make it? Did they survive long enough to make their goals?

Sometimes I will stop at a moment and touch a flower, look for an extra few seconds at the farm view from my deck, brag about how the kids turned out. I am here to do that, and it has made all the difference. Part of it is medicine, part luck.

The first part was scheduling the mammogram.