Chemolicious: Getting to Your Best Self: A Guide for Breast Cancer Patients
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Chemolicious - Terese Mascotti
Introduction
Barn’s burnt down—now I can see the moon.
—Mizuta Masahide (seventeenth-century poet and samurai)
IF YOU ARE READING THIS because of a recent diagnosis of breast cancer, I know where you are mentally, emotionally, and physically: confused and void of any more tears. Your worst fears just came true. Well, I am here to tell you that what you are facing is not a death march—or the result of a wrong turn to hell. While the journey will test you in every way possible, please know that it is just a speed bump in the course of your entire life. You have joined a club that may seem to separate you from the world with which you are familiar, and may make you feel like a leper. Rest assured that this is no Hotel California. You will check in, but you will leave. You may even come and go, but you will be better for having stayed.
Much of what you will read on the Internet and in books will speak of cancer and chemotherapy in clinical terms. This is good, because you need that knowledge. What you may not find is the en couraging voice that tells you how to improve your quality of life through your ordeal. You have to sift through blog upon blog to glean any of that. Being chemolicious
is a state of being—both in mind and body—neither one necessarily congruent with the other; sometimes both halves are opposed to the plan. Realizing that you need to start somewhere and look toward the future is the start of a very important journey to health and awareness and overall well-being; improving your outlook and quality of life is dependent on you. Your oncology team will do the rest.
I have just completed a two-year initiation into Club Cancer. My new normal is better than my old. Mine was a very rare form of breast cancer: two lumps, two different types of cancer—and both lumps were Stage II. The only choice I had was to undergo a bi-lateral mastectomy and blast the hell out of whatever was having a party in my cells. I was not prepared for that—or for the fifteen months of chemotherapy.
As a poem by Robert Frost suggests, there are two paths. We each have two choices of how to show up for our new reality, and I chose the path less traveled.
Follow me through this book. We will re-live parts of my jour ney with some humor, aha
moments, and gut checks. In the end, I promise you will be less fearful and well on your way to starting down your own path of Chemolicious-ness!
©2014 Queenkathleeni Designs
Chapter 1
Day Zero: life with a diagnosis
It’s a Familial Thing: What Kind of Patient Do You Want to Be?
AT A YOUNG AGE, my first brush with breast cancer was through my Aunt Rosemary, my mom’s younger sister. Prior to her diagnosis, she had lived a tumultuous life in an abusive marriage. She was diagnosed in her 40s, and went into remission after a few years of treatment. Her remission call meant a new lease on life. Along with her dismissal of the cancer, came the dismissal of her marriage. I realize that, for most people, the jury is still out on whether or not there is a correlation between stress and cancer, but the Mascotti clan can attest to it.
In the midst of Rosemary’s newfound independence, the even tual return of her cancer was an inconvenience. (Don’t we all know it!) She had no fear