Breast Cancer Awareness Month is fast approaching. Soon, Denver will be awash in perfectly tied pink ribbons, perky pink knick-knacks, and cleverly worded pink signs.
Of course, I am always aware that my right breast was removed due to cancer several years ago, along with a hefty helping of my lymph nodes, all of my hair (which has since grown back), and my faith in the future.
Most people prefer the stories of cancer that is detected early, battled gracefully — usually with a lot of cheerful pink fripperies — and wrestled to the ground triumphantly so that we can all live happily ever after. And then have a race.
But what about those unlucky people who didn’t catch the cancer early? Or those who did catch it early, only to have it return a few years later with a vengeance? Or the truly heroic people who beat it down as best they could only to finally die from it?
Some of us need a darker shade of pink to don — either that or a very strong pink net to catch us as we go tumbling into a metastatic cancer diagnosis.
On a sunny Saturday in May 2011, I awoke to a lump in my right breast — a cartoonishly large mass that stubbornly pushed back every time I gingerly (and then more insistently) poked my finger at it.
“It must be a cyst … a sign of age … some kind of simple, hormonal thing,” I whispered to myself as I drove to my gynecologist’s office the following Monday. After a mammogram, an ultrasound, a biopsy, several frantic phone calls, desperate texts and beseeching prayers, it was confirmed that the lump was certainly nothing simple.
And with that, I went reeling off of the cliff known as cancer.
A PET scan confirmed that the cancer had spread — to my liver — and suddenly I was facing a stage IV breast cancer diagnosis.
Staging is what the doctors use to describe how far the cancer has spread at diagnosis. When I was diagnosed, it had already traveled to a distant site, making it stage IV from the start. (There is no stage V.) This is also referred to as metastatic cancer, meaning the cancer moved (usually via the lymph nodes or the bloodstream) to somewhere other than where it started.
Metastatic breast cancer is the one that kills you. According to the Metastatic Breast Cancer Network, approximately 40,000 people die from metastatic breast cancer every year; around 150,000 people are living with it. I am one of the latter — for today.
I thought to myself: What kind of an idiot gets stage IV cancer right off the bat? Stage IV is for the losers — literally, we will eventually lose our lives to cancer. Stage IV is scary, sad and pathetic, and ends in death. No amount of pink can make that cheery.
Those who have metastatic cancer will never kick it to the curb; we will require treatment forever. And we must learn to live with that. We live in the shadows of a beast of an illness — an illness that, for me, has so far been tamed with a life-saving drug. Yet it paces ferociously, relentlessly inside our bodies like a caged animal, waiting to lunge again.
Cancer is programmed to outsmart drugs, much like superbugs outsmart antibiotics. Once the cancer gets wise to the drug you are taking, you try to beat it down with surgeries, drugs, radiation, chemo, anti-hormonals, antibodies, targeted treatments, immune therapies and clinical trials. Each time one drug or treatment stops working, you cliff-jump to another one. The side effects, fatigue and anxiety can become more and more unbearable with each leap.
In the beginning, I was wide-eyed with fear. I was a poster child for obeying all the rules of treatment. I even joked about cancer, made light of losing my hair, and smiled frequently.
I had been given a terminal cancer diagnosis, but I spent my days trying to “lighten” the reality. But at night, I lay in bed, and the terror settled on me like a suffocating blanket. I fought sleep because it seemed too close to death.
If the fear of death is primal, the fear of leaving a child motherless is feral.
The panic raged for years, and still sneaks up on me frequently. But it has been muzzled. For today, I am alive. For today, I am grateful.
So every third Monday, I have my port accessed and get a drug called Herceptin, which saves my life. We schedule our lives around it. Vacations, school drop-offs, funerals are planned around the hours that I must be at the chemo center. I can’t miss a dose.
I realize that I am one of the luckiest unlucky people I know. Metastatic cancer kills people every day. For now, in three-week increments, I am reeling in the years that I never thought I’d see.
In the midst of metastatic cancer — with its never-ending treatment, its sometimes debilitating side effects, its financial woes and its harrowing fear of death — there are bills to pay, dinners to make, children to raise, houses to clean, friends in need and tires that go flat.
There is morning and night and the spectacular, tiny, magnificent, mundane, beautiful and tragic elements that occur between those two — the rising and the setting — that make up our ordinary days. I know that always, for all of us, there are cliffs to jump, sunsets to view and races to run — for as long as we can.
And so, as morning dawns today, I will grab my dark, rose-colored scarf and join the Komen Race for the Cure, jumping into the barrage of a color that, quite simply, reminds me of my impending death.
I’ll be walking in honor of those whose last sunsets came too early.
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