I don’t know how you spent your Monday morning, but I spent mine in a giant tube while people in white coats stuck needles in me. It’s fine, it’s okay, and you’re not to worry. It’s not my first rodeo. It is in fact my 12th or 13th – MRI, that is. I’ve never been to a rodeo. It’s also my third brush with cancer, which makes me as much of an expert as a non-medical person can be. I thought I would take you with me on this particular journey, especially seeing as how it will almost certainly end well.

 

To recap: I was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer 12 years ago. It was rare in that I had two lesions in my right breast, but they were different forms of cancer. Crazy, right? So I had a mastectomy, chemo and radiation. It was really scary, largely because no one could give me a prognosis. I later learned that the rate of recurrence for this cancer (now called triple negative breast cancer) is quite high within the first three years, but declines rapidly after that. They have kept a very close eye on me nonetheless. I’ve had mammograms and MRI’s every six months for the past decade. Last month, a routine MRI discovered small changes in my left breast (the good one, I call it), and that’s how I have ended back in the tube. I had an MRI guided biopsy this morning, in which they stuck me back in the big machine, gave me a local anesthetic, vacuumed some potential cooties out of me, taped me up, and sent me home to wait for the results.

 

A note on the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre: years ago, I would drive by the building and shudder, thinking how awful a place it must be, where people must go to suffer and die. It is anything but. I have become closely tied to the hospital, both through my own treatment there, and through fund raising efforts like the Ride to Conquer Cancer. The Slaight family (my former employers) has given tens of millions of dollars to help transform PMH into a state of the art research and treatment center. It’s a place full of life and hope. I hope you never have to go there, but if you do, you’re in the best of hands.

 

Almost any cancer survivor will tell you that we all expect a recurrence. If it can happen once, it can happen again.  Strangely, you’re so sure it will return that it’s almost a relief to hear that it has. My brother, almost miraculously, survived his second bout with throat cancer this past year. My brother-in-law was not as fortunate: he died of lymphoma six years after his initial diagnosis. I was also tested for lymphoma a year after that, but it turned out to be sarcoidosis, which is a nuisance, but currently non-life threatening. Cancer follows us around like a mangy stray dog. I can’t get rid of it, can’t put it down, but I will do my best to keep it out of the house.

 

So now you’re in the loop. I was very public about my first experience, because it helped to share it with others, especially those who’d been there themselves. Lots of people still treat the topic with fear and shame, which is both understandable and ridiculous. Cancer isn’t anyone’s fault, and, as one of my doctors once famously wrote, it’s a word, not a sentence.  I should have my results next week, and I will keep you posted, but it’s going to be fine. Now you take good care.

 

 

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