Every Fourteen Seconds
An Account of Breast Cancer in our School and the Reality of the Fight
Every fourteen seconds a woman is diagnosed with Breast Cancer. That’s about four people every minute, 240 an hour, and 5,760 a day. Almost guaranteed, you’ve known someone who’s had or has Breast Cancer. Sure, October is the month of Halloween, but we cannot forget the other prevalent part of it: Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Bean Klusendorf—who many St. Joe. High School (SJHS) students may know as Ms. Klus—has lived through one of the most aggressive types of breast cancer, Triple-Negative. Classified by its quick growth, this form of cancer diminishes the chance of spotting it towards the beginning. A significant number of treatment options are made obsolete due to the fact that this type of Breast Cancer makes cells so heavily damaged that they cannot fight the illness themselves, nor can they accept outside help due to the destruction of specific receptors, according to Cancer.org.
Following a surgery that left the underside of her right arm partially numb, Klusendorf underwent eight months of chemotherapy and radiation.
“It's kind of hard to know when you're disease free. Like, maybe when they got the tumor out, I was disease free. But then you don't know if there are cancer cells in your body. So even at the end of chemo and radiation, they don't say disease free. They say no evidence of disease,” Mrs. Klus said. This leaves those who’ve had it wondering if the cancer is actually gone.
Despite chemo being the main form of treatment for cancer, there are a substantial number of side effects associated with it. While Mrs. Klus blocked out most of the side effects, there are a few that still remain in her memory, “I got sick a lot. I lost a lot of weight. Obviously lost my hair. Just a lot of, like, metal mouth all the time,” she said. Metal mouth describes how foods taste differently during chemo--either metallic, bland, or chemical-like. According to Cancer.net, It can ruin favorite foods and further cause loss of appetite and weight loss stemming from one’s lack of interest in eating.
Cancer patients experience a wide variety of physical effects, but mental ones are often overlooked when considering cancer/chemo consequences.
“My first reaction, of course, was, how could this happen to me? I'm 44, I'm about the healthiest person I know. This seems very unfair, and I felt that way for a long time, and then I felt scared,” Mrs. Klus admitted., “I had to come to terms with the possibility of dying.”
“Once I came to terms with that possibility of death, my kids will be okay. But I had to go down to the worst-case scenario and accept it and be okay with it in order to move forward,” she followed. This raises the question: do all cancer patients have to come to terms with death, whether the cancer is terminal or not?
When Ms. Klus had to accept this, so did her family.
“I think most of the people in my life just assumed I would be fine,” she said. “But I think that they [her kids] were scared and I probably didn't assuage their fears very well.”
Klus further believes that her daughter, Annie, took it the hardest. “She was the youngest and probably should have known the least, but looking back, I think she may have. And also, I think being a girl, she thought immediately that she would get it. In fact, she was in fifth grade and she was like, ‘I think I have tumors.’ So she was thinking that that was going to get passed onto her.”
The paranoia surrounding cancer and the fact that it might linger following treatment is huge. It affects the patient enormously, as well as the people in their lives, and causes mental, physical, and emotional baggage. Many people automatically assume that if you beat cancer, you can beat anything. But that isn’t necessarily the case--and Mrs. Klus feels quite strongly about this.
“I've never been comfortable with the words ‘strong’ or ‘survivor’ when it comes to cancer. Some people have more or less aggressive diseases, some people have better or worse responses to treatment, and some people have better or worse luck. We are all strong and we are all survivors, regardless of the final outcome. We all do, and did, the best we could,” Mrs. Klus said.