The Noble Circle Project: A Community of Women Surviving Cancer

Say you’re planning a trip to Italy. You read about the food, the customs, the weather. You make all your reservations. You shop for just the right clothes for the warm Italian summer. Your maps and Italian dictionary and phrase books are packed.

And then you get off the plane, and you’re someplace else. Holland, maybe. “Wait,” you say. “There’s been a mistake. We’re supposed to be in Italy.” Not that Holland doesn’t have its own charm and beauty; but Italy was what you had your heart set on.

That’s kind of what it felt like when I learned I had cancer, a year after moving to a small town in Colorado in order to enjoy an active outdoor retirement. It was my version of making that trip to Italy. But instead, I took a detour to Someplace Else.

I found a lump and called my doctor, who sent me to the radiologist. Waiting in the little mammography room, I read a pamphlet with a catchy title, something like, “Are You At Risk for Breast Cancer?” It had a bunch of frequently asked questions. Have you been pregnant? How many times? At what age did you first get pregnant? Did you nurse the babies? At what age did you start menstruating? At what age did you stop? Did your mother, aunts, sisters have breast cancer?

I took the test. I thought my odds were pretty good. If they were grading the answers, I’d have scored 90 or better in the Not At Risk category. But that was when I still thought I was going where I’d planned, instead of to Someplace Else.

We got the word on December 1, 2000, that the lump was “troublesome for malignancy.” Those were the words the doctor used. Don’t you love it? Troublesome.

My husband and I started studying the new maps that would help us find our way around this Someplace Else, the strange new territory we’d landed in. We slid into the diagnosis, one step at a time.

First we found the lump. Then I had the mammogram. We met with the surgeon, who showed us all the ‘troublesome’ things on the film and laid out the possible options. Then I had the lumpectomy. Then we had the confirmation from the radiologist, who said, “Yes, it’s malignant.” Until I heard those words, there was still a little hope that this really wasn’t cancer. The margins weren’t clean, and I had a second operation, called variously a wide excision or a partial mastectomy.

We learned the new language, with words like malignancy. Biopsy. Calcifications. Tamoxifen. Axilla. Sentinel node detection. Stages and grades. Differentiated cells. We needed a whole new dictionary.

It wasn’t what we planned. But the people in this other country, this Someplace Else, were pretty wonderful. When my husband and I knew for sure what I had, we told some old friends in faraway places and some new friends in town. The response was overwhelming. Phone calls came, sometimes within minutes of my sending the email. My oldest friend, whom I’ve known since we were six, called from Australia.

I also wrote about my diagnosis in a column in the local paper. In return I received flowers, encouraging notes from total strangers, and offers to put my name on prayer lists. People wanted to bring food and to drive me to the treatment center 60 miles away.

Shortly after my diagnosis, during those dark hours when the wolves came skulking around inside my brain, I had a dream. I dreamed that a group of people were gathered together, and someone introduced a young girl, a refugee from some war-torn country, a girl who had suddenly found herself in her own version of Someplace Else. “Can anyone here take her in and give her a home?” asked the girl’s sponsors, and everyone in the room raised a hand.

That’s what it felt like for me. Everyone around me in the country of Someplace Else was raising a hand, offering support, making it less strange and scary.

My cancer was a Stage II carcinoma, 2.5 centimeters, with one cancerous cell discovered in a sentinel lymph node. Because all the characteristics of my cancer were right in the middle, neither terribly aggressive nor wholly benign, and because statistically there was no measurable difference in treatment outcomes for women with a single cancerous cell in the lymph node and no cancerous cells in the lymph nodes, I opted not to have chemotherapy but only lumpectomy and radiation.

I did make some changes in my life. I switched to a diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables, nuts and grains. I quit drinking alcohol. During treatments I took a homeopathic compound intended to minimize the negative effects of radiation on the rest of my body. I practiced active visualization with a guide. I had regular lymphatic massages. I got as much physical exercise as I could, including swimming and downhill skiing.

It’s now been almost five years since I finished treatment and so far I’m still clear.