Today was the CIBC Run For The Cure and I went with my sister and a co-worker. Thanks for coming with me guys 🙂 I’ve added a couple of pictures.
There was a lot of people there, but not more than I expected. Parts of it were boring, the expected corporate speeches especially but most of it was interesting. I learned that I’m glad I live in BC and had breast cancer. BC has the highest survival rate of Canada. I walked the full 1K. I expected I would. It was another marker for me that I needed to make. One step closer to my normal, new or otherwise. Yes, my knees really hurt but that’s why I’ve been going on the treatmill a few days a week, and why I will keep going.
The breast cancer survivors, me included, wore pink t-shirts (made from that material that wicks the moisture away from your body. Someone was thinking, thank you!), volunteers wore grey and everyone else had white. I know this day is about survivors but I still felt really self-conscious about standing out in a crowd, getting stuff handed to me because I’m ‘one of them’.
Waiting for the Survivor’s Walk, I was talking to some of the other survivors. Mostly newbies like me who haven’t been out of treatment for a year yet. We shared complaints, and timelines and made comparisons of our treatments and the effects. Most of them had the ‘cancer baby’ as my aunt calls the pot belly we all seem to have aquired. They loved my hair and it made a couple of them look forward to the day their hair would be longer.
Even though everyone there was happy and smiling, there was still an undercurrent of sadness that I felt the most when I did the Survivor’s Walk. All the survivors do a curcuit through the crowd while everyone else watches. I know it is meant as proof that we can get through it and we are seen as fighters who overcame sometihng horrible but I still don’t feel brave or courageous. It wasn’t a large group, maybe 1 in 10 or 20 people there was a survivor. And that was sad. There should be more. And we shouldn’t have to be there in the first place. And that made me cry.
I will go again next year. And the year after that.

I’m finding that when I hear people describe me as courageous or strong or amazing for having gone through breast cancer I get upset. I’m not sure what kind of upset, but it always makes me want to cry. I don’t see myself as any of those things.
I’m not courageous. I was terrified going through all this. I didn’t draw on courage to get through it, I relied on knowing there would be an end to it and knowing I was increasing my chances for a longer life.
I don’t see myself as strong. Many days were spent in pain and tears. I felt like a baby and needed my hand held. Often. I felt helpless and very needy. I had to have help feeding myself and even getting dressed some times and to me that isn’t strong. I tried as hard as I could on the days I went out to act like there was nothing wrong. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me. I just wanted be be treated like everyone else. When I lost my hair I was devastated. There wasn’t going to be a way to hide what was going on then and for a time I did revert back to my old, shy self. It wasn’t strength that finally made me lift my chin up. It was knowing I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t choose to lose my hair.
I don’t think I’m amazing. I’m not the only one who has been through this and I unfortunately will not be the last. I just put one foot in front of the other, day after day, with end dates as markers. My last surgery, my last chemo treatment, my last radiation treatment. What was always on the horizon was the day I could go back to work. Amazing is the child with leukemia who can go through all the agonies of chemo with a smile on their face.
I see me as someone who just did what they had to do. No more, no less. I didn’t ‘fight’ cancer, I just did all that I was told to do to get it out of my system.
Maybe I get upset when people call me courageous or strong or amazing because I just want them to see me, not what I’ve been through. I know that cancer is now and will always be part of my life but I wish it wasn’t part of my identity. It attacked my body, not my mind. I hope that if ‘you’ ever have to go through something like this you’ll know you can because I did.
If I can do it anyone can.

I used to wonder what I would do if I ever got breast cancer. The idea of getting it was always at the back of my mind ever since my mom was first diagnosed with it years ago. I went through all the scenarios, surgery, radiation, chemo. I’d considered having to lose a boob if it came to that.
The thing is, no matter how many times I played over the different scenarios in my mind, I don’t think I could have ever really prepared myself for what I’ve been through. I also thought I’d take it like my mom and aunts have, silently getting done what was needed, surgery, radiation, chemo to fight the cancer. Stoically going through it all with a quiet strength that I wish I had. Getting to the end of the treatment and on with life without a backward glance.
I wonder sometimes if that’s their outside voices. I wonder if like me, it’s something they never really get over, that it’s never far from their minds. Do they get as afraid sometimes as I do of a recurrence and having to make the tough decisions all over again? Are they reminded, like I am, every time they look in the mirror about what’s happened to their bodies?
I’ve come to the conclusion that this part of my life, getting cancer, going through the surgery(s) and the radiation and the chemotherapy and the Tamoxifen, that I will never ‘just get over it’. Every morning for the next 5 years I have to take a pill. So when my hair grows back and the radiation burn is gone and my scars don’t bother me anymore there’s still that daily pill to remind me that there’s a 20% chance I’ll get cancer again. Or, for you more positive people, an 80% chance I’ll not get it again.
No. I’m not going to get over this. Hopefully though, I’ll be able to wake up some morning and it won’t be the first thing I think of. And I’ll be able to go to sleep at night and it won’t be the last thing I think of.