Am I "Over" Cancer?: Part One

Last April, my newsletter posting was entitled, “Am I Cancer Free?” Since April is the anniversary month of my breast cancer diagnosis in April of 2020, I’m usually asking myself a lot of questions about where I am post-cancer treatment in April. Now it’s October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Almost five years since I completed treatment for Type 2 breast Cancer.

I don’t like “awareness months.” If people have to be forced into being aware of something, how reachable are they going to be? Some of those questions I asked myself last April have been answered, buy some have not. As my nod to this “awareness month,” and to further my own healing, I am posting four pieces this October from my “Cancer Memoir.” Which has been subjected to a lot of editing, but was written largely between the months of April 2021 and April 2022.

There has been a lot written and shared by cancer survivors, but I have never heard or read of anything written specifically by someone who is also a survivor of sexual abuse. I’m sure there’s something, somewhere, but I haven’t read it. Maybe that’s my job. So here goes.

REFLECTIONS

April 2021

I heard on the news the other night that over 10,000 women with breast cancer would face life-long consequences as a result of inadequate screening and care during the pandemic.

I was not one of them. I guess I was lucky.

Wait a minute. If I were lucky, would I have gotten breast cancer?

I’ve begun many speeches and stories by saying that my life has been defined by three major traumas. I lost my father and brother in a plane crash when I was four. I was emotionally, mentally and physical abused by my stepfather. And I was sexually abused by a family member between the ages of eight and thirteen.

One in every four women in this country will be sexually violated before she’s eighteen.

One in every eight women will get breast cancer.

I don’t think there are statistics about women who lose half a family in plane crashes.

If “lucky” means beating the odds…then no. I am not lucky.

Cancer during COVID. One more trauma that I must not let define me. I’m not interested in hanging one more survivor badge on my lapel. I don’t want to think about cancer, talk about cancer, or even write about it.

Yet here I am. Stuck. I can’t seem to go forward, and I sure as hell don’t want to go back. But I need to find out who is waiting on the other side of cancer, and what I can learn from her. I just hope it’s someone I’ll recognize.