For me, this 20-year anniversary is different. It marks my forever war with cancer
Sept. 12, 2001 was a memorable day for almost everyone in the country. Sept. 12 was the first day in a before/after event, the kind that redefines a person, a family, a city. An event where everything you knew about life, everything you dreamed, changed.
“Everything changed” was in fact the headline of my Kansas City Star story marking the first anniversary of my diagnosis of ovarian cancer.
Some numbers: I was 48 years old. My “suspicious mass” was 10.5 centimeters, about the size of a small grapefruit. Around 11 a.m. on Sept. 11, I was watching the towers fall on TV when the phone rang. A voice said, “How about surgery tomorrow?”
Nobody mentioned New York City. Not then, and not the next morning as the nurses prepped me for surgery. The room was quiet and the mood somber, but for all I knew that was normal decorum around cancer patients.
When I awoke from anesthesia, my oncologist was standing over me, saying, “This is Dr. Hunter. It’s mostly good.” Days later the pathology report came back and my oncologist’s words changed to, “I’ll answer your question, but I don’t want you focusing on this. Thirty percent of patients live five years.” I was stage 3.
More numbers: My brother drove 1,900 miles (planes were grounded) and he was there in time to hold my hand when a nurse first accessed my chemotherapy port-a-cath, which looked like a 2-liter bottle cap under my tightly-stretched skin. In the months ahead, I discovered that about 1 in 70 women will get ovarian cancer. I also found out there were about 35 subtypes of ovarian cancer, and I had the very worst kind.
Social media was just getting started in those days, but I managed to find an online group of fellow ovarian cancer survivors from all over the country. Together, we shared advice on side effects, hopeful stories, humorous anecdotes and our breaking hearts.
About 18 months after my diagnosis, I hit a wall. My checkups were good, my blood markers were low, my hair was growing back. But something wouldn’t let me go. Maybe it was the realization that I could be one of two things: a cancer survivor or dead. I didn’t want to be either.
“You don’t have to cheer me up,” I’d said to a friend soon after my surgery. “I know I’m a goner.” I was half joking then, but later the words took on weight and heft. The grind of doctor appointments, the waiting for blood test results, the scouring of the latest research for some shred of hope had gotten to me. There was an invisible wall that sprang up between me and nearly everyone else: I have cancer and you don’t. I wish I could be you.
Somehow, I made it through. I wasn’t brave or kind or wise. I was a mess. But I endured. To quote Tennessee Williams: Endurance is something spooks and blue devils respect.
More numbers: I had six months of chemo. I went into remission. That remission has lasted 19 years and counting.
When I was a child, I’d watch people get into a car and disappear, and to me it felt like a death. Like a chasm had opened up and swallowed them. But one day, at the start of a long road trip, I looked around at all the new sights and sounds and thought: Now I get it. Life comes with you.
And that’s how it was after cancer. Despite all my losses and scars, my fears and despair, life came with me. Life opened the door, took my hand, and off we went.
One more number. My gratitude to my husband, my family, my long suffering friends, my doctors, my nurses and every single person who crossed my path and gave me some small reason to keep going: infinite.
Donna Trussell is a former writer. These day she takes walks and counts her lucky stars.
This story was originally published September 12, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "For me, this 20-year anniversary is different. It marks my forever war with cancer."