Priorities

My family has a long history of cancer – specifically breast cancer. My grandma on my mom’s side had breast cancer in her mid 30’s, which they treated with a huge surgery and tons of radiation. My mom’s older sister had breast cancer in her early 20’s, which they treated with a mastectomy and no chemo or radiation (the doctors said she didn’t need them). My mom’s older sister, my aunt, had a daughter, my cousin. When my cousin was one year old my aunt was diagnosed with bone cancer, which had metastasized from the breast cancer, and after three years and a hard fight, she died, when my cousin was four years old.

When my mom was in her early 40’s (when I was 10 years old and my sister was six years old), she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (Sidenote: her brain cancer was not at all related to her breast cancer.) She wrote this about that cancer diagnosis:

“When I was in my early 40’s and had two girls, one 6 and one 10, I too was diagnosed with breast cancer. Needless to say I was thinking of my sister and her death and my niece and the loss of her mother. It was very, very important to me that my sister’s situation did not become the situation for my girls and me. I wanted almost more than anything to be able to watch my girls grow up. So I had to make some difficult choices regarding my cancer and my cancer treatment. 

I was given a number of options for surgery. Because wanting to be with my girls as they grew up was one of my priorities, I chose to have the most involved and longest surgery, a bi-lateral mastectomy with reconstruction. I spent a week in the hospital, and a few weeks recovering, but, when the oncologist said that I needed to take six months of chemotherapy, I readily agreed.  

Now, usually my husband drove me to these ‘charming’ chemo appointments but I remember one day he was talking on his cell phone as we were getting ready to leave and I ended up driving. All the while I kept thinking ‘so why exactly am I driving myself to an appointment that I really, really don’t want to go to…?’ Well, you might have guessed that I did it because it was important to me to survive, a priority in my live to watch my kids grow up.”

She wrote this in 2010, a year before her stroke, as a part of a talk about priorities that she gave at a retreat she was leading. I read it yesterday for the first time, though I’d heard this story before. But I hadn’t heard the story from her, I’d heard it from my dad. When my mom had breast cancer I was really young, and my sister was even younger. It wasn’t even a possibility to me that my mom wouldn’t always be there. So I never knew, until after my mom had her stroke, until my dad told this story when she was in the hospital after major brain surgery, that this was why my mom had had reconstructive surgery and chemo, that my sister and I were why she fought so hard.

It was beautiful to hear my dad tell the story, but it was even more beautiful to hear it in my mom’s own words. To know that she wanted, “almost more than anything,” to see my sister and me grow up. To know that she underwent extensive surgery and painful months of chemo and radiation just so she could be with us.

It seems a little like a cruel joke that my mom was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer when my sister was 21 and I was 25 – two major milestones in becoming adults. It’s like the cancer was just waiting for us to grow up before it struck again, giving my mom her wish and nothing more. Rationally I know that cancer doesn’t have an evil mustache that it twirls as it cackles maniacally, but some days it really feels like it does. And some days it makes me want to fly to Neverland, so I’ll never grow up, and so my mom will never be able to die.

Whether it was cancer’s evil plan, or just a coincidence, or a gift from God that her breast cancer went into remission and she got to see us grow up after all, it just makes me love her more to know how much she loved us. She fought for my sister and me – she fought, and endured pain, and did so much, just so she could be there as we grew up.