Mammograms, Mastectomies, and
Mom’s Apple Pie:
My Recipe for Handling
Breast Cancer
and
Returning to a Healthy Life
By Vickie Jenkins
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Vickie Jenkins
This book is also available in print at most online retailers.
Discover other titles by Vickie Jenkins at http://vickiejenkins.com/
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.
Cover Design: Copyright Carlo Carmona
Cover Illustration: Copyright Margarets/Bigstock.com
Interior Illustration: Copyright iStockphoto.com/hfng
“It’s Breast Cancer Awareness month.”
My friend Carlo looks up from his laptop at Priscilla’s Gourmet Coffee Shop. “You gonna write it?”
I sigh. “Yeah. I guess I’m ready now.”
Yesterday in follow-up treatment at the clinic, the nurses sat me between two brand-new chemo patients. One squeezed her eyes shut during the entire two hours, and barely breathed. The other talked excitedly in Spanish to her husband, who held her hand and translated. I opened conversation with each of them, giving them tips the doctors and nurses don’t know, because they’re just watching, not living it. I was old hat now, eight months in.
Last month a friend whose mom was diagnosed with cancer asked me to write down what I had done to recover, so I began to chronicle what had happened with my own treatment and the things I learned and applied to help me.
This book is not about what treatment to choose. It’s not a technical report. It’s not about the history of the disease. I figured there were plenty of cancer books out there that covered all that.
This book is simply a series of successful actions—both traditional and non-traditional—that I took to speed up my recovery from breast cancer surgery and chemotherapy. And the bizarre, ironic, comedic moments that accompany the harsh reality of handling a body crisis.
I always had the goal of – “Handle it, and get back to health.”
If that is also your goal, perhaps some of the tips in this book might help you. Or you can at least have a laugh or two at the sillier stories.
But in the end you design your own program. Your health is your responsibility and it all begins with the attitude you take. Survive? Or Succumb.
I write this book in my birthday month—October—which is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month here in the U.S.—of which I am much more aware now.
I am celebrating another birthday, another year on this planet. I give thanks to all who helped me—family, friends, medical specialists, spiritual leaders, and fellow explorers.
I dedicate this book to you, the readers—and to the next worlds that you will create as a healthy, glowing spirit.
Much Love,
VJ
Table of Contents
PART 1
Not I, Said the Frog: The Lump
Okay, Here’s the Deal: The Confront
Betty Was Right: The Diagnosis
Family Prayers, Friendly Action: The Plan
PART 2
Is That a Recipe Book?: The Surgery Prep
Let’s Get Out of Here: Post-surgery Recovery
The Secret Weapon: Body Communication
PART 3
Red Bells, Yellow Bells: Not Just ‘Physical’ Therapy
Fully Armed: Chemo, Shots, Drugs
Farting at the Library: Handling Side Effects
PART 4
Life Imitates Life: Giving and Receiving
Great Haircut!: Cancer Camouflage with Wigs, Boobs, Makeup
Cancer-Free. What a Lovely Phrase: Returning to Life
What are You Looking at?: The Healthy Info Diet
PART 5
Happiness Re-defined: Abilities Gained
The Cancer Discount: Help is a Two-way Street
Have Your Pie and Eat it Too: Doing What You Love
Prom Night: Celebrating Success
PART 6
Remembering Me, Remembering You: Poetry in Motion
Things I Thought: Mirror Images
Take Two Pages & Call Me in the Morning: VJs Successful Actions
References, Websites, Organizations
Post Script – I Will: Thank You
Part 1: 1
Not I, Said the Frog:
“Lots of people have lumpy breasts.”
“I barely have breasts—let alone lumps.”
I found it while lying in bed one March morning.
I was home sick with the whatever-you-get-when-a-nasty-person-lands-on-your-communication-lines-and-you-don’t-recognize-it illness.
A small, hard lump on my right breast. Smaller than a marble. Kind of.
I was barely working as a consultant during the recession, and had no health insurance. Well, there was nothing I was going to do about it, I decided.
That was a mistake.
Looking back, I recall a line from the story of the Little Red Hen, about help—helping others and helping yourself:
“Who will build the fire?”
“Not I,” said the frog.
Part 1: 2
Okay, Here’s the Deal:
Definition of confront: (verb) to face without flinching or avoiding.
“I gotta tell you something.”
I looked into my doctor’s bright blue eyes.
“There’s a lump on my right breast.”
“Well, let’s do a full check-up then.”
I took off my blouse and put on the gown, laid down on the examination table.
He felt around both breasts, carefully, with a female nurse present.
When I was dressed he said, “You need to get that checked. Now.”
This doctor was a fairly quiet-voice type, but this time I detected a sense of urgency.
He wrote up the lab order for the sonogram and mammogram.
“Get these tests done now. This week.”
Seemed a bit of a rush, since I’d now had the lump for at least eight months, but—okay.
I called the lab, with two obstacles—they had no openings for three weeks and the cost was prohibitive.
For years I had been an employee, always with health insurance, seldom using it. Now I wasn’t and I needed it and didn’t have it. So I checked around and found a program that offered free mammograms where they could fit me in the next week.
Here we go.
“There’s the second one.”
“The second what?”
“Lump.”
I was lying on the table with my arms up, the cold gel sliding the sonogram probe around my right breast, when the technician stopped it dead in its tracks as I watched the monitor over her shoulder.
I’d only seen sonograms used to find fetuses—healthy heartbeats, teeny toes, shifting shadows. This picture looked like a black mass. Next to another black mass. Two lumps.
My mind flashed to a joke, as it often does in crisis.
“Sugar? One lump or two?”
Two, next to each other.
I heard the same urgency in the voice of the doctor who came in later to read the images. “We’ll need to do a needle biopsy—as soon as possible.” That turned out to be the following week.
The Breast Center is as nice a place as you can build, considering the people and equipment there are designed to diagnose and treat trouble.
Female patients sat in muted-tone chairs, gowns wrapped tightly around them, waiting their turn, thumbing through magazines loaded with pictures of perfect women with perfect smiles in perfect bodies. Every one of ‘em had two boobs. Some may have been implanted, but they had ‘em.
The waiting women hung their heads, silent. Not a smile among them.
As I waited in the mammogram room next to giant, shiny equipment that would soon be pinching my breasts—again—I selected specific things in the room to look at, to help me stay calm and in present time.
I kept it up until my breathing was steady and I was able to confront things in the room without freaking out.
I used to get freaked out easily—something my former therapist called an “anxiety attack” — but hadn’t a clue what to do about it. I left that ‘treatment’ behind and actually learned a way to handle those moments—without drugs, without side effects—bringing me back into present time, and smiling.
After the technician took multiple pictures of both breasts with the mammogram machine, we moved back to the sonogram room, where I got shots in the right breast to numb it, and then I watched the computer screen as they guided a needle into each dark spot in the breast to snip out pieces to send to the lab.
The sonogram technician and two doctors were extremely nice to me during the procedure, making small talk to distract me from the snip and suck process. When it was finished they all smiled at me. But I saw the flicker of concern in their faces. They already know. They’ve done this a thousand times and they already know.
By the way—as part of this ‘core needle biopsy’ they take chunks out, then mark the inside of your breast by implanting tiny metal pieces in different shapes for each lump, to mark where they’ve taken samples. I got a tiny knot and a ribbon embedded in my right breast. So—would I set off alarms at the airport body scanners? No, they said. Shucks. That would have been exciting.
All this happened after Thanksgiving. By Christmas I was looking at the small bruises and stitches on my right breast and apologizing to it for putting it through so much trauma.
Christmas week I waited for the results. And waited. And waited. My doctors were on holiday. I wasn’t.
Finally the biopsy results were faxed to my doctor who called to have me come in ASAP. I hate that phrase.
Part 1: 3
Betty was Right:
First, You Cry.
I kept remembering that book title from fellow newswoman Betty Rollin, and boy, did she nail it.
I sat there in the extra room they have at the end of the hall at my doctor’s office. The one where you sit and react after you’re received the bad news. Just before you get your shit together and start planning your treatment.
But first, you cry.
My doctor was straight forward with me. She’s done a lot of spiritual work as well as medical treatment, and she told me that with Stage III breast cancer there is no ‘drink grape juice’ or ‘seaweed treatment’ or alternative programs out there that had successful survival statistics. “At Stage III, those people are not around anymore.”
I got it.
So, let’s proceed with the standard medical treatment, which has worked successfully on 100,000 women just like me. Go directly from A to B without a circuitous route thru Q, Z, Y or anything else, and get this handled. ASAP. Now I liked that phrase, I decided. And the decision to act is everything.