From Cancerous to Cancer Free: How My Mom Won the Fight

When my mom first got diagnosed with cancer, I don’t think I understood what it would mean for my family.

And certainly not for me.

I guess we were all a little naïve after her first diagnosis of colon cancer in 2011 didn’t require chemotherapy. When she went for her checkup earlier this year, we anticipated the same result. But we were in disbelief when the doctor’s told her she would need 6 months of chemo treatment for another type of cancer. In her liver.

Prior to her chemo treatment, she had to undergo a surgery to half 40% of her liver removed. Luckily, it is expected to regenerate itself within 5 years.

Liver cancer is actually one of the fastest growing cancer types in Canada, particularly increasing in men. However, the Canadian Cancer Society estimated that approximately 1,550 men and 490 women would be diagnosed with liver cancer in 2013. 

My mom was one of them.

While social drinking and smoking are leading causes of liver cancer, my mom does neither of the two. And by that I mean she's never touched a cigarette and only drinks one glass of Bailey's a year!

You can imagine the frustration that comes from this. I see people who smoke a pack a day and are perfectly fine. But I learned, through this experience, that this is the wrong way to look at it. Rather, we just have to accept that this challenge has been given to us, and before we go looking for excuses and places to rest our blame and grievances, we should put that energy into fighting it.

It hadn’t even really sunk in until my mom came home the first day of her treatment with a fanny pack attached to her. When I asked her what it was she said it was the “chemo cocktail”.

She was strong for the first little while. Well, she was strong all the way through. But there were days when I saw her get weak, and it weakened me too.

There were days I would excuse myself and let tears fall silently in fear of what was next. I couldn’t stand the days I would come home and see my mother unable to be her usual independent self, but still trying to be strong.

The last year, quite frankly, has just been an absolute rollercoaster for my entire family.

But somehow, we made it.

After 6 months of treatment, and 9 rounds of chemo, we got the news last week that my mom had been cleared of cancer.

I fell to the ground in disbelief, shock, and awe. I felt a weight I hadn’t even known to be on my shoulders lift itself and I felt my life begin to piece itself back together, and the worry that rested in the cracks of separation dissolve.

Since then, my mom and I have come up with a list of all the things we learned going through this. We’ve narrowed it down and these are what we believe to be the things that made my mom a survivor. 

Keeping in mind that although she won her fight, she was only 1 of the 490 estimated women who would get their diagnosis. We write this hoping that they too, can get some sort of hope from our own experience and come out a survivor, just as my mom did.      

      Positivity.

I watched a documentary earlier on this year that featured a woman who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She said that a large part of her healing were her thoughts and her surroundings.

During her treatment, her family made it a point to make the household a very light and comforting place. They only watched comedies; no crime shows, no sad movies, they only watched things that would make them laugh.

She also said that she began every day with thoughts of healing. She would repeat “thank you for this healing” each and every day until she went back to the doctor only to find that she had been cleared of cancer.

When I told my mom this, we started practicing this as well. We stopped watching “CSI” and “Criminal Minds” and watched “Seinfeld” and “Mike and Molly” instead. She had a proclamation in front of her seat on the couch that said “Get up and fight! Life is waiting for you!”

And she fought. And she won.

When you believe in something so wholeheartedly, it’s hard to imagine an outcome other than what you had imagined. I felt, for the weeks leading up to her final appointment, that I would get a phone call from her saying “I’m clear”. And although I hadn’t told her this, those were the exact two words she said to me after leaving the doctor’s office that day.

Support.

One of the biggest challenges with cancer, or any illness for that matter, is for others to understand what the sick person is going through. For the first while, I felt that I shut my mom out whenever she tried to explain what she was going through. When I realized that I was doing this selfishly to create my own illusion that she wasn’t sick, I started to ask her how she was feeling, even if it meant hearing the hard news.

You can’t avoid reality just because it’s easy. I think people set themselves up for all sorts of disappointment when they do this because it makes it harder to accept. By accepting the situation, despite the difficulty, we can actually deal with it.

By just sitting and listening to her talk about whatever she had to say, she was able to feel like she wasn’t alone in her battle. And she wasn’t.

Faith.

I don’t consider myself a very religious person, but I found myself on my knees multiple times throughout the process, praying. I asked for her to be healed, but I also asked for strength for both her and the rest of my family.

I think you find your faith in the hardest of times because you’ve got to have something to believe in, and certainly something to hold on to.

Overall, I can honestly say that the experience did more good than bad. Firstly, because we’re optimists, we were able to extract the things that we learned, the love that we shared, and the closeness that this situation can bring to family if only they approach it properly and together. Secondly, because I’ve seen a strength I didn’t know existed both in my mother as an individual and in my parents as a couple. In turn, that created a strength in me that humbled me and showed me the difference between things that matter and things that don’t.

I hate to be cliché, but there is no other lesson greater learned through this experience than how short life really is.

My mom began to make a list of all the things she wished she had done before she was ill, and what she would do if she had been cleared of cancer. Now that she’s better, we plan on accomplishing each one of those things upon complete healing.

My mom told me that the day she was diagnosed, she said to my father, “I know you didn’t sign up for this.” And my dad just laughed and said, “It’s in the fine print.”

I learned a lot about life, love, and family. And if you or someone you know is sick, allow yourself to be softened by the experience. Everyday I think about the people I met during her illness. I think about the nurses who made house calls at all sorts of hours just to make sure my mom was okay.

But most of all, I think of the people who gave me little pieces of hope and prayer along the way.

The strangers who stopped to acknowledge the cancer pins I would wear on my sweaters at work. Or the one lady who gave me her own pin and told me to hold on to it, smiling and saying it would bring us strength. 

And it did.

Prior to this experience, I can’t say I had much faith. In anything, really. But I feel that I view things differently. I believe in people more. I believe in things I didn’t believe in before. And I believe in miracles.

Because my mom beat cancer.

To everyone who is fighting, has fought, or knows someone in the struggle please know that you are not alone. Our hearts are with you, our prayers and thoughts are with you, and we are with you. 

Why Do We Doubt Ourselves?

It is often said that “change is good”, and “new things are exciting”. But I would have to disagree, because three months ago I started a new job.

Maybe disagree is a harsh word. But I can definitely conclude that the above statements are entirely subjective. Quite frankly, there is nothing “good” about not knowing how to do anything in your new environment. And there is nothing “exciting” about being entirely useless without the guidance of the person training you.

Or at least, this was my way of thinking prior to becoming independent, after a long, tiring, and frustrating three months’ probation.

For weeks on end, I would watch my coworkers as they performed their daily financial retail tasks. I looked on as they would open their tills, close their tills, and balance their tills by counting and ensuring all the money was there. They would “request money from the safe”, “float money back to the safe”, and a whole bunch of things that I had a hard time believing I would ever really understand how to do.

Despite dying to be on my own, so that I too could do all the financial retail stuff, and having a sickening desire to be free to work without someone peering over my shoulder, there were a lot of things I was dreading doing without someone leading the way.

The truth is, I’m always the girl that knows what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Every job I’ve ever had I’ve mastered in just under a month. My social skills and urgency to learn and be independent is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing when you are free to flourish, a curse when seniority is priority.

So you can only imagine the horror of waking up every day and heading to this job where each shift lasts 8 hours and you’re the youngest one there. Every day you learn something new, not from an organized manual but from someone whispering “by the way” to you every time you mess up.

If there is one word that just about sums up the last three months of my life-in-training, the word would be “humbling”.

According to the dictionary, the definition of humbling is:

“Marked by meekness or modesty in behavior, attitude, or spirit; not arrogant or prideful.”

I’ve come to learn that humbling experiences are often the things we fall upon by chance. Striking up a conversation with a stranger whose life tells a completely different story than yours can be humbling. Being the victim of a natural disaster can be humbling. Starting a new job and being rather disabled, in the sense that you are at an absolute disadvantage in terms of knowledge and ability can be, rather, is very, very humbling.

This last week, I had a closing shift. My heart didn’t start racing at lightning speed until I realized that for the first time, I was the only one closing. Usually my manager partnered me with a senior teller, but this time, it was just me.

Closing, prior to recent, was hands-down the sum of all my fears. I had dreaded this shift from the very first day I watched as my trainer shut down the store, while still serving customers, and held the responsibility of thousands and thousands of dollars at once.

Despite being a bit familiar with the process, although I still felt it to be a foreign territory, I was entirely unprepared when my manager said:

“Tuesday you’re closing by yourself. No one will be in the store with you. Are you ready?”

“No,” the voice in my head said. “Yes,” I said out loud.

So on Tuesday evening, I stared at the clock. Time went by so slow. But one thing I know about time is that it never goes slowly enough to make the moment you are counting down to never happen.

Be it the death of someone you are dreading letting go of, your wedding, or the birth of your first child. The moment always arrives.

Right before my last coworker left, she looked back at me and said,

“Hey Steph, don’t worry. You can do it.”

When she said that, I eased up a bit. Actually, I eased up a lot. 

For so long, I felt like I really could do it. But I felt incomplete without having a certain threshold of self-doubt.

Truthfully, these were the words that echoed in my head all day long. In fact, they had echoed in my head for the months leading up to this Tuesday. But for some reason, I hadn’t been able to relax the way I was able to when the words were said in another person’s voice.

That night, I closed the store perfectly, and on my own. I ran into no hiccups, no bumps in the road, no alarms went off, and I wasn’t escorted home, to the hospital, or to my grave in an ambulance. (Don’t ask why I imagined this being the end of my night, my imagination is quite vivid)

I wrote down a list of 5 steps that simplified the closing process for me. A list that I, and only I could understand. Essentially, a list that would get the job done.

I followed each step, making sense of my messy handwriting, mish-mashed sentences, and strange order of preference.

And I did it.

Driving home that night, I thought about my experience. I reflected on how I felt now that I had done the one thing that I influenced myself to believe that I couldn’t do on my own.

I had come to realize that we doubt ourselves for two potential reasons. The first reason being because if we doubt ourselves and succeed, we are extra surprised. The second reason being if we doubt ourselves and fail, we’re not surprised at all because we didn’t believe we could do it in the first place.

Really, I’m not sure why I doubted myself. But I am sure that as I watched the time go by, so, so slowly that day, I wasn’t afraid.

Anxious, maybe. But not afraid.

Deep down inside, I knew that I could do it. I had my list of 5 steps. I had my messy handwriting to guide me all the way through. But moreover, I had faith in myself.

The main objective at my work is twofold. The first thing is to keep the customers happy. This means being happy yourself. Emitting an energy that is welcoming, genuine, and reflective of how we feel inside. The second thing is to balance.

When you think about it, it sounds a lot like life.

Be happy. And be balanced.

And when I left that night, I was not one penny short. I was not one penny over. I “balanced to the T”, as my coworkers call it, a phrase which I now use and understand. As a matter of fact, I use and understand all the phrases I once didn’t.

In life, you have to find your way. Sometimes people will show you the ropes, other times you’ll find them for yourself, and in some instances, you might have to form your own ropes, attach them to the appropriate places, and just swing like Tarzan in the jungle.

But if you find your own way, and believe in yourself, at least partially, then don’t you think you will succeed?

It’s okay to ask for help, and it’s definitely okay to need it. You can’t expect to be a master of everything, because you can’t become a master without being a novice at one point.

It’s even okay to doubt yourself. Especially if you only doubt yourself to get twice the surprise when you succeed. But it’s not okay to doubt yourself and plan, expect, or hope to fail simply because it’s easy.

And really, failure is always the easy option.

That’s why people give up. That’s why people quit. And that’s why people walk away.

Because it’s not always easy to believe.

Things take time. I know a lot more than I did three months ago, and a lot less than I will three months from now.

But one thing I knew long before three months ago, and one thing I will know long after three more months pass is that I can do it.

I can do anything, really.

I am just as able as another person, perhaps even more able than another person, simply because I believe. I didn’t always, but I do now. And that’s about the only tool I need in my toolbox. That's about the only tool anyone will ever need in their toolbox.

That.

Happiness.

And balance.