Wait. The very next day I got home after my treatment and noticed an area on my chest that looked like someone had drawn on me with a large-tip pink marker. Interestingly enough, the radiation technicians actually DO draw on me with grape-scented (purple) or cherry-scented (red) markers every day in order to line me up with the machine properly (and they sometimes fight over who gets to draw on me—it’s rather amusing).

When I tried to wash off the markings, I realized it was an actual burn. Youch! So I got busy with the cream again and things look a little better.

Seriously, I’ve never been a person who tanned well, so I decided early on in my life to look at my white skin as an asset and not worry about it. Now I’m actually getting a “tan.” Too bad it’s only on one side of my body and covered up all the time anyway. :~) I also have sporadic “zingers” (shooting pains or aches) that happen every so often in my right breast. Apparently that’s to be expected, according to the radiation technician who, upon my telling him about it, remarked, “Yep, that’s us.”

I intended to attend the monthly support group for women with cancer at our hospital for quite some time. In fact, I tried to attend about two months ago, but got the date wrong and showed up a week late. This month the group invited a special speaker, a nurse practitioner with 20 years of experience who talked about hormone therapy (the kind of medication some women take after cancer treatment to suppress their estrogen). I finally made it to a meeting this week.

I’m glad I went. The experience was both depressing and inspiring. Depressing because we had to move to a bigger room since there were so many women who attended; so many women at various stages of the cancer experience (many of whom were older than me).

Looking around the table at all of these women made me think, “Man, cancer sucks.” We went around the table to introduce ourselves and tell about our reason for being there. One woman was scheduled for a mastectomy this coming Monday. Another woman had a double mastectomy two weeks ago. Two of them brought friends for support—friends who themselves had survived cancer.

There was the long-haired woman who took up dragon boating (see photo, right) to exercise and gain range of motion in her arm. The woman who sat next to me was diagnosed with Stage IV (metasticized) cancer over 10 years ago. She went through treatment and her cancer went into remission. During her treatment, she attended Western Washington University to become a counselor, sometimes using a walker to get around because her bones ached. Now she is taking medication to treat the disease as a chronic condition and keep the cells from growing.

I met women who have been through less than me and more than me. The meeting was depressing to me because of the topic. I learned that there are “inconvenient” side effects from taking hormone therapy to suppress my estrogen. Some people have few side effects and others have a lot.

The bottom line (and the remark the nurse practitioner made over and over again) is this: "Anything menopause can do, these medications can do better." Hot flashes, weight gain, mood swings, night sweats, vaginal atrophy (oh my, that sounds wonderful), etc.

Many women simply cannot tolerate the medication because it interferes with their lives so greatly. One woman who was already taking it said that she had such frequent night sweats that she got no sleep at all, not to mention that she started vomiting on top of it. These women often end up taking additional medications to handle the side effects from the hormone suppression—antidepressants, antiseizure-type drugs, etc.

I guess the reason it was so discouraging to me was that I was mentally geared up to get through radiation (as in: “Hey, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel!”). Hearing about the planned hormone treatment that will affect me for the next several years of my life made me realize that I am kidding myself. This thing isn’t over by any means. I will deal with the cancer diagnosis for the rest of my life.

I always knew that on one level, but in order to get through surgery, chemo, and radiation, a person needs to know there’s an end to it. It keeps you going. It’s this thing that we humans need like food and water . . . this thing called hope.

But then, I did a little “self talk” and realized that hey, I’m being given a second chance to LIVE. What are a few side effects that may interfere with my daily life? At least I get to keep on LIVING, ya know? People living a few years ago didn’t have the luxury of taking medication to suppress their estrogen and preventing a cancer recurrence.

So . . . bottom line: be thankful for every day you get to take a deep breath, hug your loved ones, share a meal, go to work, and all the little things you do that make up your daily life.

As a Christian, I’m learning that my ultimate hope isn’t in all of those things anyway. I’m learning that my attachment to the things around me are temporary. The real hope is in my life after my bodily death—the hope of communing with God for eternity. Without that hope, fuhget-about-it!

You would think that having been a Christian for so long that I might have figured out all of this. But you see, I’m learning this in a new way. Before, it was all intellectual and detached. And I sometimes hear other Christians saying these high-sounding things and I think, “Do you really mean that? If you’re diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, will you be so casual?”

Since my diagnosis, I’ve heard Christians say, “Well, we’re all going to die anyway.” And I think, “You don’t really think you’re going to die anytime soon. You think you’re going to live a long time.” We all think that. We might intellectually acknowledge that we could die sooner than old age, but we don’t really believe it in our gut. When you are presented with a situation that makes you believe, “Hey, maybe I’m NOT going to live a long time. Maybe I won’t be here one, five, or ten years from now,” it’s a shocker, believe me. You look at life in a whole new way. So that’s the upside of cancer. You get new “eyes” if you’re paying attention.

One of the most disappointing cancer books I’ve read was called, Lopsided—How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting. Sounds like an amusing book and in many ways, it was. The author has a scathing wit (emphasis on scathing). But when I finished reading it, I realized that the author (who survived inflammatory breast cancer) didn’t seem to have learned much along the way. If she did, she sure didn’t write about it. She even admitted at the end of her book that after everything she experienced, she hadn’t reflected much on her life and she was still the same. I thought that was both sad and amazing. It made me more determined to learn the lessons I should learn from this. One of my biggest fears is to have gone through cancer and not be a changed person.