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Breast cancer Journey – The Recurrence

In 2002, in the midst of two- yes, two major life events  I got a breast cancer diagnosis. I was weeks aawy from leaving Canada and had started packing up my apartment. Robin was going to be moving into his first place on his own, having decided not to go with me, so we had to pack for him and plan that move. I had a terrible cold, I remember, and was feeling ill and very stressed. I had to sell stuff, store stuff, ship stuff, get stuff ready for moving, pack up my life here, help Robin start his own. Saying I was overwhelmed doesn’t come close to describing my state of mind.

The good news is that I got through my surgery, I made my moves, both of them, and after a rough Journey with radiation treatment in the UK, I was done. Ten years later I was signed off from my frequent mammograms and support programs. I felt somewhat bereft, having to leave behind some quite magnificent UK support. I was done with cancer.

The bad news is I’m back on the same Journey now. 22 years apparently isn’t long enough. I’ve always regretted not writing about what happened to me so here I am, trying to do it again.

For several months I’d been noticing  my left breast looking different, smaller. I mentioned it a few times to doctors and nurses, all who said I was older, my breasts were changing, and of course my affected breast would be smaller. Then I asked again. This time I said I wanted a mammogram,

I went in mostly expecting my fears to be unfounded. A few days later I got a call that something was seen in the image and they wanted me to come back for another mammogram and an ultrasound. My heart had sunk when I saw the number and they said it was the breast centre. Bloody flashbacks. This was eerily familiar, following the same pattern from before. They had a cancellation today, they said after I questioned a couple of later dates. Yes, I’ll be there, I said. Then the replacement doctor called to tell me I had calcifications and went on to say that things have really changed since the last time. If it’s cancer, people just live with it, she said. One step at a time, she said. I found myself with that similar dark and suffocating feeling but I still hoped that it would be nothing major.

In I went. I had the regular and the “special” mammogram that hurts more Sitting outside the door, I could hear the technician chatting with the person before me. Then she left the room for a while, spoke to someone in another room and came back to cheerily tell her everything was fine and she could go. My turn. The ultrasound that went on and on and I felt my optimism fading. It faded even more when the technician left to chat with someone in another room, coming back to say that they would like to do a biopsy, and what I like to do that now or make an appointment to do it again another time. I said now.

For a breast biopsy a small incision is made and the ultrasound guides the doctor to remove tissue samples. In my case, there were two areas not too far apart and the biopsy sounds like a loud snap, which makes me jump. The breast  is numbed so there’s no pain other than the one in your mind. And so I waited. They told me my result would be ready on Monday or Tuesday- it was Thursday then but I also knew my doctor made calls on Wednesdays so I’d be waiting a while. So that was that. Meanwhile I resisted Googling. I really didn’t want to. It was all a fluke anyway.

I have a friend who has also had breast cancer so I turned to her. The emails tell more of the story:

–I hesitated to email you. I think twenty years isn’t enough. Today I got breast biopsies. PTSD is real.
–Jesus, why would you hesitate? You keeping anything from me makes me nuts. If you don’t tell me everything, I will hunt you down like a dog.
–Why did I hesitate? I didn’t want to dredge it up for you or have you be Pollyanna either. If you Google don’t tell me anything. I just don’t want to know…yet.
–Can’t believe we’re still worrying about this shit. Let’s hope we’re just worry warts.
–“Best case scenario” – benign calcifications. In my last situation every best case fell so yeah PTSD. It’s so going the same way so far. I waver between terrified and matter of fact.  Who knows. Maybe I’m good for another twenty years.
— I could not take the loss of you.

Wednesday came the news from my doctor’s summer replacement that there was cancer detected from the biopsy. I would be hearing from an oncologist for another appointment within a week. In fact I heard the next day and the appointment was for the following Tuesday afternoon.

Index of all my Breast Cancer Journey Posts

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Breast cancer Journey – Index

Anything that says Breast Cancer Journey is optional reading. At this point, the peripheral things may pop up in my regular blogs. These ones, however, are the meat of the matter. Read at your discretion and I’ll likely be adding a post or two when I go in March for my follow up.

This was a big job and I’m quite sure there will be typos, repeat paragraphs and photos – although some overlap seemed OK.  Anything you see that’s wrong, please comment. Read at your discretion. I’ve tried to put photos that might upset at the bottom, and there may be more formatting problems in doing so. There are also photos I meant to include that haven’t shown up, but I don’t have the energy to fix right now. That may follow. I did my best!

Recurrence
Surgery – Lumpectomy
Chemotherapy
A Scary Day – Cardiac?
Second surgery
Another Scary Day – Anaemia
Radiation
Hair and other side effects
Support
Follow ups and all the confusion
First mammogram after treatment#
Three-Month Oncology follow-up
Bye Port
What comes next – LIVE!
Collateral, misses, and chaos

A little picture I did on a Post-it note. It shows me surrounded by love
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Meandering in place

Saturday, 8 November, 2025

This morning I walked to the store. I bought a Sausage McMuffin, which is a very rare thing for me to do, but today I thought why not. No egg. Just the sausage and pretend-cheese.  In the Longo’s near the flat, I bought a machiato (single – semi wet, so she said – and I picked up two packs of marked-down meat (good till tomorrow) and bemoaned the fact I had hesitated too long for the last bag of marked-down gianduiotti and it was gone. While I was doing all this, I knew I was ready to write again. It’s been an age.

Sausage McMuffin wrapper in Canada
Always bilingual in Canada. Sausage McMuffin this morning

An age.

Why? At first it was just ennui, an unwavering sense of boredom with my surroundings. I wasn’t used to this milder interest in where I was. It wasn’t crushingly boring, but it just didn’t stir me. What to write about? I’ll confess that this feeling really hasn’t changed all that much. I don’t know if it will.  But then last October everything got murky.

Cancer.

I am just putting it out there without explanation for now. I have written a lot in draft and email and chat and, as always, in my head and I feel ready to talk about it.  I’m not quite sure how to go about it because some of you may not want to know. My plan right now is to start plopping things in here and make the subject line Breast Cancer Journey – xxx. That way, anyone who wants not to know, not to get inside my head, can skip those bits. When they’re all done, which I hope they will be, I’ll link them all. They’re part of me so I don’t think I want them to stand alone. Deal? (Do let me know so my hesitation moves to determination.)

So…Art Therapy. I’m in a group. We’re part of an art therapist’s next thesis. It’s hard. It’s much harder than I expected, but that’s because I hear the other women’s (yes, all women) stories. They’re bittersweet, crushing, sadder than I can explain. And then I feel  lucky, and then I feel bad about feeling lucky, and then I feel maybe I’m not going to be lucky, and then I don’t know how I feel. But sad, yes sad.

I’ve not been pleased with what I’ve done. The other women draw abstract forms that express so much. They range from amateur to promising, the latter maybe more than that. My drawings are poignant, too complicated, too real (too?) and they all depict ‘home’ in various ways. What I’ve been writing about is being me – I just want to be me – because this journey creates an unreal feeling, a sense of having morphed into this unrecognisable person. It’s a person who feels detached, often unwell, and in my case certainly a nomad in more than the sense of where I call home.

This week the assignment was The Path – where is it, how does it look, are there signposts, are there forks, how does the path feel? So here is mine, the most complicated of the group and thoroughly me.

Art therapy – 7 November 2025

At the bottom of the picture is a barbed wire fence. It’s daunting,  but if you look closely, there are a few gaps to wriggle through if you want to get onto the path. It lies, yellow (brick road, of course) just through the fence and begins. At first, there are many thorny bushes to make me hesitate moving forward, and although these start to disappear, they crop up here and there, showing that even near the destination there’ll be challenging times. On the right of the photo there are pleasant distractions, a tree stump to sit on, a swing for the fun of it. To the right is a duck pond with a bench to sit on. The top of the pond is swampy, it’s not all lovely. A thorn bush and stump block the path near the top – more determination is needed. Throughout, the trees are flourishing, and there are nests – this place can be nurturing. At the very end of the path – home.  It’s yellow,  with a yellow sun in the sky to echo that. Two smoking chimneys show that someone is home and there’s a welcome inside.

Not hard to interpret this. It’s a difficult journey, one I want to abort many times, where I feel I can’t go on. My love of photos that show gardens so wild that the houses are only barely visible is a metaphor for home being there, but you need to look for it.

I’ll do my very best to keep writing and share my journey. It will be here if you want.

 

One thing I haven’t mentioned is how bad my eyesight is now. I was due to get cataracts removed, and that went pear-shaped after my diagnosis. If you spot mistakes, it’s because I am seeing things in double-vision and in a faded version. Getting my eyes fixed will come next, but it’s a tough decision to allow my body to be invaded again so soon. Wish me luck!

 

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I might understand monsoons now

Wednesday, 17 July, 2024

This summer there’s been a lot of rain. I mean a lot. Not only rain but thunderstorms and wind. Last week it was because of Hurricane Beryl. This week I’m not sure.

Monday, which I may have more to say about, it rained very hard for a couple of hours. I had to be out for appointments so there was no way to avoid this.

On the way to the hospital, the first of the rain started. I had to call an Uber to get there
At the front of the hospital (Women’s College Hospital – a story I need to tell). I worked here for 12 years but it didn’t look like this then. They pulled the old building down and now it’s very modern and has become 100% ambulatory

Yesterday was a different but similar story. I woke in the morning to a dark day with some threatening clouds. I knew I had to go out at lunchtime for the third of my four appointments this week, so I hoped and hoped as I listened to the loud thunder out there somewhere. It didn’t take long for the rain to arrive. And I mean rain.

Threatening clouds and darkness in the early morning
The clouds gathered and got darker
The rain started and the horizon faded

It rained so hard we couldn’t see much outside. It came down like it would never stop, loud and relentless. I thought about my appointment and wondered if I could dare to step out in it even for a second.

It rained like this for three to four hours, letting up slightly just as I needed to leave to go out. When I got down to the apartment lobby, all the power went out. It stayed out for another few hours and I soldiered on. Leaving my appointment I was stunned to see brilliant sunshine, not much fun when you have had your pupils dilated, but again I pushed on. Some stores had simply closed up for the day – there were talks of this continuing late into the evening – while others seemed to be in holiday mode, relaxing in their doorways, chatting to people inside and out. Transit was ‘moderately affected – streetcars run on electricity from overhead cables, but I did manage to catch one and made my way to the Philipino shop that has a hot counter. They’d promised to stay open one more hour and I’d promised to bring something home if we couldn’t cook. I stood making my choice when the lights came on.

It was like a celebration in there. It felt almost like lockdown everywhere and I had a nostalgic moment or ten. Everyone was chatting, complaining lightheartedly about no hydro, no internet, no stove to cook on, food defrosting in the freezer…and it felt like family.

I’m glad to have had those moments and remembered only too well how people come together when things are rough, and here it was again.

We eat on the balcony if the rain isn’t coming in the wrong direction. We just pull the table in closer to the window and watch the weather

In total, Toronto had 10cm of rain. It was as much rain as usually falls in a single month in July. Cars were partially submerged, some even floating, basements (many which are apartments) were flooded and uninhabitable, roads and highways were closed. Today many still don’t have power 32 hours or so later.

So the climate is changing and climate emergencies are more frequent. Much like the pandemic, which was anticipated for decades, we aren’t prepared and I haven’t heard of anything in the works either. Maybe I just don’t know about it – not just maybe. All I know is it all felt apocalyptic yesterday. I didn’t feel scared but I did feel curious.

I didn’t take photos. It was too wet, then too hot, my hands were occupied and my battery slowly died.

Other than that, it seems I am old. Who knew! One of my Monday appointments, was supposed to be to confirm that, yes, I did now have arthritis in my hands and I needed a splint🙄. However, the lovely OT told with me great enthusiasm it was to offer me a walker (‘mostly covered by OHIP’ (Ontario’s health care system) .  The next day my appointment was to inform me that my cataracts were ‘mature enough’ for me to get them removed and I could have the first one done next week – what?!  I hesitated and said I needed a little time to organise my life. Perhaps many older people don’t have much else going on and, although my life is a bit sticky right now, I do have things to arrange.

Today I thought about my mother peeling hardboiled eggs as I attempted one myself. Then I thought about how she was younger than I am now on the particular day I was reminiscing about. This led me to consider my grandmothers, both of whom were proper little old ladies with their floral pinnies, beige lisle stockings, varicose veins, full corsets, and orthopaedic shoes while younger than I am now. I pondered it all.

My paternal grandmother,  Sophia (Sophie). In this photo she’s holding my brother John and so is probably not 70 yet
My dad with my maternal grandmother, Charlotte (Lottie) perhaps a little younger than I am now

Before today I’d thought of writing everything that’s been messed up in the last few days – crazy-making stuff that only now seems funny – but it’s not in the cards now, unless i need some material for my stand-up act. (I don’t have one.)

Today it didn’t rain and that’s enough. To sweeten the deal and the day, cocktails in a can will be available in Ontario corner shops this week. No big deal, you say? You have no idea! Yes, in 2024 this is just happening.  I say it all the time but I wish I drank. Or do I?

P.S. According to the Met offices, Tuesday was not a record day for rain. In fact, the day I went to the hospital to have Robin — 28 July 1980 — was quite a bit worse at 118.5mm. People roll their eyes when I tell them how heavy the rain was that day (the air was turquoise,’ I’ll often say) but, you see now, it really was.

 

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Birthday and the beginning of my memoirs – an indulgence

Monday, 6 March, 2023

I am seventy-five.

You know what. I have written that line in my head over and over for the past almost-year. I wanted to be able to say it but every time I could, I actually couldn’t. I couldn’t write those words. I knew why. I didn’t want to be that.

On this very day it’s my birthday, so I can write those words for only another few hours – according to the memory of my time of birth – what was it again?? Then it will be another number, a bigger one, a scarier one. And the birthday greetings keep coming so what can I do? Head out of sand.

I can’t put this number together with the reality of how I feel. I’ve read about this for so many years now. Age and how you feel don’t always go together. Sometimes I am in my mid twenties – I like to say 26. It’s the age I was when I got married and in some ways got stuck – and other times I say eleven – I am just so silly. I feel like I have no age. My mind isn’t connected to that.

At a very young age someone suggested that ‘When you get older, you will change your mind about that’ (whatever that was at the time) and I replied confidently: ‘That’s not who I am. I always like how today is and I think I’ll still feel that way then too.’ I was right. I don’t let myself get stuck in the past. I enjoy change and innovation. I do like to think back and some stuff has remained my preference, but no. I love today. I live around people who are stuck – what they wear, their music, their sense of what is ‘good.’ I can’t get behind that way of thinking. It’s too subjective.

What a time I’ve had. How many things I’ve been able to experience in their own time. How could I have been open to those things had I been stuck? I feel annoyed at how many things I will never get to see because I’m not here. We’ve created an awful world in so many ways but then we’ve also created some amazing things and I got to experience them. How lucky.

I don’t think this feeling of no-age is just mine. I’ve heard it from so many people throughout my life. I don’t think anyone has ever attached an age to me. They could call me child-like but they call me ageless. Whatever that means. I’m me – Janice. Is my agelessness really me or is it denial?

I’ll take a short detour to talk about appearance. Everyone in my family looks younger than they are. I’m that way. I used to love, now roll, with hearing ‘You’re HOW old? Are you sure?’ Sure, it can be flattering but it doesn’t detract from how I feel looking in the mirror at my softer and ever-softening self. I hate my baggy eyes, the pouchiness that is my neck and chin, any lines that appear anywhere (not that many, thanks genes) my weight gain, the way my body is crepey and ropey and falling towards the floor. The way my breast surgery, which at first hardly showed, now makes one breast look (to me) half the size of the other. I am vain and I know it. The way my knees hurt and my hips get stiff and sore. Not being able to walk, climb, get off the floor or out of the bath. My voice feeling weaker. The way I get dazed when I laugh too long or cough too much. I think, ‘Who is this person? Who have I become?’ And, yes, how much worse will it get? Then I try to metaphorically get up off the floor and on with living with who I now am.

I’m doing my best to live every day. I’ve lived with fear my whole life, or almost. It’s slowed me down and made me miss a lot. But I’ve still done a lot. The price of freedom and today-living is high, I won’t lie about that. I’m reaping some difficult crop now. Today is not the day to dwell on that. I’ve dwelled on it a lot. No choice. Life right now is very difficult but I have to live.

That’s my birthday message so that I write those beginning words before it’s not true anymore. I’m pleased that I did it finally. It was my last chance.

Back to being ageless now. Thanks.

I’m a scaredy-cat but I’m being brave and posting this. (Hit publish, Jan.)