I Have Cancer. This Stinks.

Honestly this first post is a bit of a drag but hopefully up from here!

Snowball fight in the front yard, 84 degrees in Minnesota. Day after my diagnosis.

Welcome to a corner of the Internet I never wanted to create!

Hi, my name is Laura. I have cancer, and this statement is absolutely surreal. I am a writer (and thus detest that I have used 3 adverbs thus far; every one of my editors would have cut them out) and a speaker and the founder of Mothering Spirit. More importantly I’m a wife and mother of 5 sons. I have been a lot of things and had a lot of things, but cancer was never one of them.

UNTIL.

(This is starting to read like Snoopy’s It was a dark and stormy night.)

I found a lump in my breast two weeks ago. Lumps are good for sugar, expected on heads when parenting 5 lion cubs, but not great when it comes to breasts. We want them smooth and sleek and lump-free.

PSA: I was never a person who did routine self-exams. I was a person who routinely thought, “I should do that” while reading about them in a doctor’s waiting room. I found this one in the shower (I think? honestly it was so small that I have no dramatic memory of The Moment That Changed My Life because it wasn’t). But because I was overdue for my yearly exam, I figured this should spur me to make the appointment and at least mention it to my midwife.

Cut to midwife’s office. She is one of my favorite humans on the planet, because we have been through hell and back together.¹

We spend most of my appointments laughing, crying, telling ridiculous stories about our kids, talking politics, lamenting the state of the world and health care, and generally annoying her nurses because we back up all her other appointments for the day. We did this per usual and had a great time, all routine. Then I said, “Oh, I found this small lump, can you check it?” And I watched her face turn serious as she felt it.

Next thing I know, we’re scheduling a mammogram and ultrasound. I am mildly concerned about this, but she assures me that it is likely a cyst or something benign.

On my drive home, I muse to myself that waiting nearly 4 weeks for these appointments sounds like a terrible idea, bathed in sleepless anxiety. So I reschedule them and wind up at My First Mammogram² on Holy Thursday.³

Let’s speed up this saga and get the action moving. Mammogram and ultrasound both showed a “highly suspicious” mass per the radiologist who read the scans. He said we had to biopsy on Good Friday. I thought this sounded hellacious but not worth complaint on the day when Our Lord And Savior Suffered And Died. So I went. The biopsy sucked. I cried a lot and skipped Good Friday services because I was recovering. Holy Saturday: endless waiting. Easter Sunday: still too sore and bruised to celebrate with family, so I stayed home with our youngest.⁴

Easter Monday dawned. I waited all day for my stupid phone to ping with the news that would make or break my life, and a lot of you were praying for me on that day, and then the test results came and the nurse called to explain and it was horrible.

So here we are. I have invasive ductal carcinoma in my right breast. Stage TBD. It’s triple-negative which means aggressive. I will have to have chemo, surgery, and radiation (order TBD). This will all unfold over the next year. It will absolutely suck. But I have a winning smile and sharp wit and strong line of love and lament direct to the Divine. So I am going to absolutely destroy this tumor out of my 42-year-old body and then run a marathon.⁵

Next round of fun findings should be rolling in next week. We’ll meet with the surgeon to learn more about whether we’re scooping out the melon, hacking it off the tree, or taking two because why not. (Lumpectomy vs mastectomy/ies, but fruit metaphors are more fun.) They will do an ultrasound of my armpit to see if the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes, which is the predictable pattern of spread for breast cancer.⁶ I will also have a bunch of bloodwork, meet with a geneticist to learn if I have any of the mutations for breast cancer, and get an echo of my heart (which sounds like a Rilke poem or a Backstreet Boys song but is just a routine read of my ticker to get a baseline for how chemo might affect it). Unsurprisingly I will also be contributing to my therapist’s kids’ college fund again AND receiving the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick because have I told you about my friend Jesus who literally makes all things new? He’s the Greatest Of All Time.

I promise you I will not write long-winded missives every day, but consider this the back story. What I really want to do here is update you beloved image-bearers of the Divine who are helping me bear this weight AND ask for particular prayers. So here we go:

1. Please pray that the cancer hasn’t spread. Specifically a clean ultrasound of my armpit. I absolutely love the idea of people praying for my armpit.

2. Please pray for us to discern the right care team and next steps. We want to seek a second opinion, but things are also moving so quickly (which is great!) so we have to discern how to navigate everything and seek other opinions at the right time.

3. Please pray for my husband, my kids, my parents, my siblings, and our extended family and friends. This news sucks for a lot of folks.

4. Please pray for my complete and total healing. Because this is going to happen, folks. This is not the end. This is a trial, a hard chapter, a momentary affliction preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure. (Read the whole thing here: 2 Cor 4:6-18. It’s so good.)

If you feel moved to help more, one of my dearest friends started a GoFundMe to help us with medical expenses and the significant loss of income this treatment will entail. Soon we’ll be starting a meal train too, because my kids are already piled aboard and clamoring to leave the station because why can’t we just eat Chipotle every night (they’re not wrong). But please believe me when I say your prayers are EVERYTHING. They are going to help make it for us and break it for this Damned Spot (which is what my husband has unaffectionately named the tumor). Out, I say. One, two,—why, then ’tis time to do’t.⁷

Love,
Laura

1. It’s not worth it to play the Pain Olympics. But I’ve sort of been around suffering before. Tl;dr: infertility, miscarriage, death of my delightful daughters after their premature birth, preeclampsia & premature birth of their little brother 3 weeks before the world shut down for Covid. Trouble is, my husband and I also had an incredible experience of grace while our twins were dying that reordered everything we knew about God. So now I know it’s no longer worth it to gather questions about WHY to fling at the feet of the Almighty. Because, friend, what comes next for all of us is such INDESCRIBABLE JOY that your whole laundry list of complaints about this hard life here below will evaporate. Trust me on this one.

2. I’m only 42 and had been nursing our youngest until 6 months ago, which is the required waiting time post-breastfeeding to start routine mammograms. So I’d never had one before but YOU SHOULD. Consider this your urgent reminder to stop putting off whatever mildly-inconvenient routine screening you need to make. Do it for me or I will haunt your dreams.

3. For Catholics like moi, Holy Week holds the most sacred days of the year. The most moving liturgies, the deepest theological truths. The timing of these events cannot be mere coincidence, but honestly I feel like God laid it on a little thick here. Just my $0.02.

4. He is only 3. I will be defeating this cancer.

5. Nope. Never. But I will enjoy many more years of kitchen dance parties with my kids and lovely neighborhood walks because that’s the speed at which humans were made to move.

6. One of my best friends from college is an all-star physician who has been spending her free time as a doctor (zero) translating all my medical reports for me this week. She has taught me phrases like “predictable patterns of spread” and I delight in dropping them into conversations with health care professionals to sound like a bad-ass who is knowledgable vs. the scared liberal arts major that I actually am. Double-major in oncology, here we go!

7. The Scottish play.