Had I Known by Joan Lunden

Author:Joan Lunden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Calling All Campers

With over three million women battling breast cancer today, everywhere you turn there is a mother, daughter, sister, or friend who has been affected by breast cancer.

BETSEY JOHNSON

Fashion designer, diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000

The last day of camp is always filled with mixed emotions for everyone. There’s laughter and tears and lots of hugs to go around. It marks the end of another memorable summer for the boys, most of whom board a bevy of buses and head home to their anxious parents, who haven’t seen them since visiting day. However, some of the boys stick around and are joined by their dads for Jeff’s annual father/son weekend, which has long been a favorite for dads and sons alike. As a father, Jeff feels strongly that our children need our presence more than our presents, and there is no greater impact on a son than spending quality time with his dad. The dads play basketball and soccer and water-ski and scale the climbing wall with their sons. They become a bunch of weekend warriors, killing themselves on the courts and the fields, and then sleep on a child’s single bunk bed near the other snoring dads for a couple of unforgettable nights of bonding. Ah yes, good sports they are!

I felt like I was doing better, but I was ever mindful that chemo is cumulative, and I was acutely aware that life had been a bit more challenging lately. I was closing in on finishing my first twelve-week round of chemo, hopeful that there would be good news before I started the AC round in September.

I’d been warned by Dr. Z and my oncologists that the side effects of Adriamycin and Cytoxan were much tougher than those of Taxol and carboplatin. Adriamycin is infamously known as “Red Death” or the “Red Devil.” With a name like that, it cannot be fun. Curious as to why everyone referred to the Adriamycin as “Red Death” or “Red Devil,” I was finally told it was because of its deep red color and its high level of toxicity. It is designed to kill as many cancer cells as possible in your body. It’s like sending in the whole damn U.S. Army along with the Navy and the Air Force. But once it’s inside your body, it doesn’t discriminate, so it kills off a lot of the other cells at the same time, including the good cells—the white and red blood cells that you need.

Interestingly, my oncologists and surgeon felt that my cancer might be completely gone by the time we got to the surgery in November. If that were the case, I would still have to follow the surgery with radiation. I wanted to remain as optimistic as possible. The good news just kept pointing me in that direction, because I got the results from my gene testing: Everything came back negative for BRCA1 and BRCA 2 and the entire panel. This meant I did not carry any genetic predisposition to developing breast cancer known to date.

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