Flying through the air with tears trickling down my face as I parasailed in Mexico. That day was May 15, 1999... I wondered what I would be doing next year on my birthday. I was looking forward to getting a bit wiser and more assured of myself in the next year. The beauty of the earth amazed me and life was really good for the first time in a long time. I can still feel my long hair flying in the Caribbean air. That next year on May 15, 2009, I lost my hair from my first round of chemo. As I blew out my 27 candles I thought about the next year as I always do... but this time I did not know what I was welcoming. Life or death. You see, on Feburay 1, 2000 I was diagnosed with Invasive Ductal Carcinoma of the left breast. The breast closest to my precious heart. I had a lumpectomy, 4 rounds of AC and 33 rounds of radiation at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. I do not want to go into the details of the treatment because in my heart, the cancer started after the diagnosis, the surgery, the treatments.
It is very easy having cancer because you do not know you have cancer at that time until it starts to catch up with you. Since my treatments last year I have been renegotiating with my body everyday. Cancer is not an intruder, it is a trader. Your own body trades you in and this is what I deal with everyday. I do not think of myself as a cancer patient everyday and think of dying everyday, but just enough to bring me down once in a while.
I want to talk about the cancer inside my head... the mental disease I feel I have now. It gets me at my most vulnerable moments, like watching a mother walk with her child. Maybe one day I will have a child and die having it if my breast cancer comes back during the pregnancy. Maybe after, when she/he is older. Then I will not be able to attend my child's graduation. These thought creep up on me at the most silent times in the day. It is very healthy to think these thoughts but no one ever wants to hear it. No one wants to hear that this is my Vietnam. That any day now a bomb will drop again, and I will have to go to war again with my own body. These are the thoughts masked behind my smiles and laughs.
I am the first to tell people that I had breast cancer at 26 and that I am a survivor. I survived and conquered. I have achieved the greatest achievement... life. I am not happy that this happened to me at this moment but I truly have to admit that I see things in a different way and treat myselft with more respect. I am doing the things I love best and what I really want to do. Some people might think that I am being selfish but to me it is living for the first time. I do not know what God has in store for me, and if I will be here this time tomorrow. I do not want to deprive myself of the things I enjoy and want to experience in a given day.
I wake up everyday and thank God that I am still here. To see the stars, feel the air in my newly grown hair, to feel the rush in my heart, the gentle drops of the rain on my face, and the sound of a good friend calling me baby. Life is all good and getting better day by day even with the cancer in my mind. I feel like I am living on a borrowed dream sometimes, but I know what I have and who I am now.
Kim's story first appeared in our November 2005 Newsletter |
