Breast Cancer is Sneaky

By Elaine Smith Dunlap

Breast Cancer is sneaky.  Unlike other diseases, there’s no sickness.  If I hadn’t seen a dimple in the mirror that caused me to feel for a lump, I would have never suspected I had a life-threatening disease.  My mammogram in April showed nothing.  Even the surgeon, later looking at the X-ray, couldn’t find it.  By October, six months later, there was, as my gynecologist said in response to my “But it doesn’t feel like a pea” – “No, it feels like two peas”, a significant mass.  That was October 16, 2006.  Within three days my life was forever changed with the diagnosis of cancer.  Absolute terror!  Inexplicably, the first person I phoned was my daughter in London.

On November 1st  a 1.9 centimeter tumor, along with eight or nine lymph nodes, was removed from my right breast in an amount of tissue the size of a tennis ball.  And there hadn’t been that much to start with.  The tumor was the size of a quarter.  The surgeon wanted to make sure she got it all.  Kaiser saved my life.  They found it quickly and got it out so fast it couldn’t become stage two…by .1 centimeter!  There was no lymph node involvement and clean margins (she did get it all).  I blame the hormones I took for ten years to keep me young.  But who knows – it could have been the plastic water bottle I used for five years, the moth cakes, the Martinez fumes that wafted over DVC where I taught, or even the pesticide-filled strawberries.  Now I take an estrogen inhibitor pill every night which makes me even older.  I AM SO GLAD TO BE ALIVE.

I hadn’t worn a bra for fifty years.  Now I’m lop-sided and I have to hoist the left one up to look reasonably symmetrical.  It’s not pretty but if you’re going to get cancer- breast cancer’s the one to get.  They’re really getting good at curing it.  I didn’t devour every bit of info available on the inter-net.  Basically I surrendered to my wonderful doctors.  I don’t want to know any more than I have to about all the awful details.  I was really afraid of having to take chemo.  I resigned myself and even prepared for a mercurochrome wig and asked my oncologist if wine were forbidden.  Dr. Suyehira, who brooks no masculine bovine feces, said “I can see you don’t want to make this decision”.  She continued “You want someone else to do it for you”.  PROFOUNDLY SO!  And with my husband in the room with me for witness, “I don’t think you need to do the chemo” were some of the sweetest words I have ever heard in my suddenly all too finite life.  But, of course, I’ll never be completely certain she was right.

Some people hide their cancers, I broadcasted mine to almost my entire e-mail address book.  I don’t know why, but it helped to share and almost all the responses really supported me.  A woman in a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in southern France meditated every day in front of a photo of me.  I’m certain it helped.  Those closest to me had the hardest time, I think.  My husband and son did their best but I think they were almost as frightened as I was.

The worst part of having it for me, since I never got sick, even with the radiation, is not knowing if or when it will come back: the psychological assault of fear.  For the first year or two, I’d wake at two or three in the morning in a cold terror, trying to confront the possibility of death.  Cancer, more than anything, is a nightmare of insecurity.  It’s actually THAT from which one most has to recover.  That has passed as I approach year four of remission.  But whereas, before the Big C, I never thought I’d have to worry about dying till I was 80 or so- now I truly know I can be snuffed at any moment.  Something exquisitely beautiful stops me in my frenetic tracks every day, with gratitude.  And every moment with my grandson is incalculable treasure.  My son recently wore himself ragged in planning my 70^th birthday party and I promised my daughter-in-law two days a week, instead of one, of babysitting.  That is if I can ever slow down from traveling to Central Asia, Antarctica, Bhutan….life IS short.   And maybe cancer helps us to focus on that and not waste too much of it.   Let’s see…..should I clean my room today or try to write some more on that novel……..?