When people find out you are a cancer survivor, they have questions. I try to answer them. They also have friends or relatives who have been diagnosed with cancer. I always make a point to offer my email and phone number to these people. Whether they use it or not is up to them. My friend Heather is like that. She has taken it further and volunteers at Hillman Cancer Center for Special Events and Patient and Family Support.
Sometimes when I’m contacted, my experiences aren’t enough. Heather is one of my first phone calls when I need reinforcements. She never disappoints.
After an old friend was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, Heather came through once again. “Tell her to get the book, There’s No Place Like Hope by Vickie Girard,” she said. “It’s by a woman who was living with stage 4 breast cancer. She is so positive, but she doesn’t sugar coat anything.”
I decided I should probably read this book before I recommended it. I have to admit it took me a little while to actually order a copy. Being a survivor is awesome, but at some point you have to step back and just be a person again. I worried reading about her journey would put me back in the chemo chair and bring back the whirring sounds from radiation therapy. I still break out in a cold sweat when I have to have panoramic X-rays.
When I heard from my friend that her tumor markers were up and the cancer was in her bones, I knew it was time to put on my big girl glasses and read the book.
In 1989 at the age of 36, Girard found a cancerous lump in her breast seven months after a clean mammogram. Doctors performed a lumpectomy and removed 21 lymph nodes though there was no lymph involvement. No follow up treatment was recommended.
A year and a half later, she started having shoulder pain. Girard was afraid it was breast to bone cancer, but five doctors dismissed her concerns. Seven months later, a bone scan revealed five spots of cancer on the bones of her upper torso. In 1992, Doctors basically told Girard to go home and get her affairs in order. With treatment they predicted she could last a year to maybe a year and a half. If her cancer didn’t respond to treatment, she probably had six months.
Girard and her husband refused to accept such a bleak prognosis. They learned the value of the second opinion and the third opinion – of not only finding a doctor they believed in, but finding a doctor who believed in Vickie.
Girard spends surprisingly little time talking about her treatments. The focus of this book is hope – the power of hope is amazing.
The book is organized in short chapters with sound bytes from Girard about life. I’m not going to lie, some pages made me cry and for a moment I felt that terror I used to get whenever I had to have a test, but the feelings were fleeting because Girard had a word of encouragement waiting for me.
She begins her chapter aptly titled, “Confronting the Bully” with these words. “I describe ‘cancer’ as the one word in the entire English language that the mind sees in all capital letters. May this book help all who read it to change the case, reduce the size and the power of the word itself, so that we may all better fight and better survive this disease.”
Girard covers everything from the shock and denial that comes with a cancer diagnosis to the nausea and lovely baldness of chemo, the relief of an all clear and the surprisingly powerful survivor’s guilt. She fought with insurance companies to make them cover her treatments. She went on to become a patient advocate and her testimony before the U.S. Congress helped change many of the existing laws regarding breast cancer.
Along the way, she reminds us to live, let go of regrets and never stop believing because “there’s no place like hope.”
I’m so glad I read this book and finally sent a copy to my friend. In a world of cancer statistics and probable outcomes don’t settle for being a number choose to be a Vickie Girard.
Vickie Girard was once again diagnosed with metastatic cancer in 2002 and she once again battled and won. In 2007, after 16 years surviving metastatic breast cancer, she passed away from complications related to cancer. Her book is available on amazon.com.