I am grateful they have few memories from that time, but feel cheated that I missed so much of this special time because I was feeling weak and run down. My children were so young when I was first diagnosed with cancer.
The whole time I was being treated for cancer, I couldn’t wait to get to the “finish line,” the day that I finally crossed off all the chemo and surgeries, the 33 rounds of daily radiation, the weekly blood work, the scans, the additional five months of targeted therapy. I dodged the chemo chair on my second dance with the disease, luckily, but I was left with only one breast, heightened post-traumatic stress disorder, and a stronger feeling that my body, not to mention the Canadian medical system, had failed me. Six months after finishing my initial treatments, coinciding with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would be diagnosed with another form of breast cancer - an extremely rare type had existed alongside my original tumour but was undiagnosed, again, because the doctors thought I was “too young” for this particular type of cancer. The goal was to shrink the tumour with eight cycles of chemo before having surgery to remove the cancerous area and affected lymph nodes, and then blast it with daily radiation for six weeks. There was pressure to get me into a chemo chair as fast as possible, as my five-centimetre tumour was growing quickly thanks to an aggressive cancer subtype.
I try not to dabble too much in the “what ifs” of my diagnosis, but I can’t help but wonder how long the cancer was growing inside me and if my life expectancy would be better had someone investigated earlier. It took a few months for anyone to consider that the lump in my breast was something other than blocked milk ducts from breastfeeding my son. My diagnosis followed the latter pattern. And when they do go see one, cancer is not high on the list of investigated diseases because cancer is not common in people under 40. Many young adults do not have a regular doctor. Young adults are typically healthy, meaning they might be less likely to visit a doctor until they really need to. A late diagnosisĬancer in young adults is often diagnosed at later stages than those in older cohorts for a number of reasons.
I was receiving an avalanche of medical information and trying to process what was happening to my life, but I was most fixated on finding a friend who also had cancer - someone I could talk to, someone who would really understand. Looking back, that behaviour seems a bit creepy, but it highlights how rare cancer is in young adults. My hair started falling out by the fistful a couple of weeks after my first chemotherapy infusion.
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