A Year With Breast Cancer
By John Bach
Today marks exactly a year since the words “breast cancer” first echoed off our kitchen walls. Twelve months later — every day for 365 straight — that phrase has continued to reverberate in our home.
Dominating so much of our lives. Stealing our focus. Hijacking too much of our joy.
It was July 15, 2021, and we knew the biopsy results phone call was coming. Julie’s initial ultrasound three days prior had revealed a one-inch lump, a “malignancy.” But we held out hope it wasn’t cancer. Those hopes were dashed when the nurse navigator mouthed the words “tumor” and “aggressive form of breast cancer.”
If you’ve followed Julie’s treatment, you know she endured months of chemotherapy, followed by a double mastectomy. Aggressive cancer calls for an aggressive response. And that all took place in the first dizzying seven months.
So there we stood in our bedroom on Feb. 22, once again craning our necks toward Julie’s cell phone, as the doctor spoke the sweetest words we could imagine: “complete response” and “cancer free.”
It was what we hoped and prayed for and what so many others who joined her journey had prayed for so intently. All downhill from there, right? The cancer is gone. Let’s get back to regularly scheduled programming. Time for life as we previously knew it to resume.
Not exactly.
The truth is that the last five months since that call have been incredibly hard, and much harder than she imagined. Julie’s double mastectomy brought all sorts of complications. As if having her breasts cut off wasn’t already incredibly challenging, she’s suffered through surgery after surgery and procedure after procedure. And she’s nowhere close to finished.
But hey, you’re “cancer free,” so time to move on.
If only it were that simple. It isn’t.
Not for the person left behind after cancer. Not for the person disfigured by its wrath. Not for the person who’s still facing months of immunotherapy infusions, more surgeries and the lasting effects of chemo. Not for the person traumatized by it all and left to wonder why.
To be clear, we are incredibly thankful that Julie will outlive this disease, but among the lasting lessons after a year with cancer is that you don’t simply move on from it. And while the reverberations of the words “breast cancer” continue in our home, we pray that time and healing softens their impact.
