my inner cowgirl

Over the next for Fridays we will be following an amazing story of inspiration, hard work, survival, and a true cowgirl spirit.  One of our local cowgirls will tell us of her amazing and triumph battle with breast cancer.  

Here is her first post: 

Okay – so, I drive a pickup.  And I can saddle a horse, and ride.  But I’m no cowgirl. I do, however,  know what it means to ‘cowgirl up’ – I learned when I was 38 years old, with two young daughters, and I was told I have breast cancer.  My friends, trying to be encouraging, said interesting things, like this:  “It’s not a death sentence, like it used to be.”  Another said, “I know someone with positive lymph nodes, and she’s just fine.”  But I knew it wasn’t quite like treating strep throat – I was facing serious and hard decisions.  I also knew of women who had lost their battle and died of this disease, in spite of following their doctors’ recommendations.  So what was I to do?  Cut the cancer out, and radiate the breast?  Cut the breast off, and be done with it?  Or, have a bilateral mastectomy, just in case?  Cutting off healthy tissue, ‘just in case’, seemed unbelievably barbaric.  At first, I refused to consider it.

Then one day, my husband came home from work, and told me a man he worked with had asked him to tell me something.  He said, “Tell your wife to do everything she can.  My wife had a single mastectomy, and five years later the cancer came back and took her from me.”  But even hearing this didn’t make the decision for me.  The clincher for me was when my eight-year-old daughter took my hands in hers, looked me in the eye, and said very seriously, “Mommy, please do whatever you can so that we don’t have to go through this again.”  We.  That hit it home for me.  I alone didn’t have cancer.  My whole family had it.  And I wasn’t making decisions for myself only.  I was deciding what lay ahead for everybody who loved me.  So I ‘cowgirled up’ – I had the bilateral mastectomy.

It was only later – after surgery - that we knew I had done the right thing.  Once the doctors could see my cancer ‘up close and personal’, they knew that it was aggressive, behaving in an unpredictable manner, and moving quickly.  In spite of being a very, very small tumor (smaller than a pea), the cancer was already in my lymph nodes.  Surgery wasn’t the end of it, like I thought it would be.  I was facing months more of treatment.  But instead of being terrified, I felt only a sense of resolution.  I was resolved to do whatever it took to fight this beast and survive.  That was the day I discovered I was tougher than I thought.  That was the day I discovered my inner cowgirl.
See more of her story next week or follow her blog at: http://breastcancerbites.blogspot.com