Feb 15/24 CTV news talking today about the increasing incidents of breast cancer in younger females, and the fact that mammograms are now being offered in various provinces to women as young as forty who are at risk. Once again the importance of trying to find cancer early. I have a sister who won’t have mammograms, even though I have breast cancer. That is her choice. But for me, if I hadn’t had a mammogram, my cancer, at this point eight months after it was diagnosed, would likely have grown from a Stage 1 to a Stage 3 (cancer cells double every six months), and would be in my lymph glands and possibly elsewhere. So I stand solidly on the side of testing, with mammograms being the gold standard for finding cancer early. My cancer was found because my new GP hounded me, saying that he couldn’t take me on as a patient until I had a colonoscopy, which I reluctantly did, and a mammogram. Only the mammogram came back positive. Believe me, if you get cancer you can take solace in the fact that it is caught early, you don’t want to be diagnosed too late and then wish you had done the testing.

Feb 9/25. I had a friend who was dying from breast cancer a number of years ago. I ran into her husband who encouraged me to go to see her as the end was near. I immediately drove to the hospital to pay her a visit and once in her room, I saw a very slender old lady in the bed. I went out to the nurses station and told them that they had given me the wrong room number. They escorted me back in and assured me that this elderly looking lady was my friend, who would have been around 50 years old at the time. When she opened her eyes she recognized me right away, and as she spoke she was moving her arms, swatting at something in front of her. “I’m sorry Sharon”, she said, “but the spirits keep getting in the way, so it’s hard to see you..” It was shocking but interesting that she saw spirits around her. I asked her what I could do for her, was there anything she needed? She told me that she would love to have some ice-cream. As it was nearing the end of the day, and visitation was almost over, I told her that I would come back tomorrow. As promised, the next morning I came into her room with a tub of ice cream. She wasn’t in her bed but I heard her speaking behind a curtain. I could see that she was with a caregiver, who was apparently an ‘end of life’ nurse. The woman shooed me away and I left the ice cream on her bedside table. From what I was hearing, my friend was very upset, she was saying that she didn’t want to leave her grandchildren..it was heartbreaking. And she was one of the kindest, sweetest people I’ve known in my life…I’m wondering why we need to have the ‘end of life’ discussion when our time comes? My father had it when he was dying of Parkinson’s. I remember the end of life nurse relaying to us that she was advising him to ‘just let go’, and that he was fighting it, saying he, ‘wasn’t ready yet’. I don’t see how this helps the dying, unless they ask for a way out. Is it to move things along, so that the hospital bed is available to the next patient? I want to know why my friend couldn’t just have her ice cream and speak with me, if she wanted to? But then again, eating does prolong life and maybe at that point, the goal is not to prolong life. So you tell me, readers, is there a good reason for this ‘end of life’ discussion?

Feb 6/25 Saw my surgeon today, six month checkup. I was worried that the appointment might be delayed or cancelled. Do these medical professionals have any idea how important they have become to cancer patients like me? How dependent we are on them? It’s a very vulnerable feeling. I told him about the lump in my breast, that I first felt on Christmas Eve and that, since I already had an appointment scheduled with my radiation oncologist the following week, I decided to let him deal with it and leave my surgeon alone. Was it me or did he seem offended? “I didn’t want to bother you”, I said. “You could have”, he replied, adding, “can you at least send me a copy for my records?” “Of course, I’m sorry”, I told him. Everything takes on new meaning with cancer. I walk around gingerly, afraid of losing a member of my cancer team, not wanting the status quo to change, not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings. It’s very strange. What if one of them changes hospitals, I fret? Or gets annoyed with me, which could happen quite easily (you’ll understand if you know me, let’s just say I ask a lot of questions). I have read about cancer patients who are upset when their appointments become less frequent and they see their cancer docs less, they feel abandoned. I don’t feel that. I just feel too fragile to lose anyone on my team. Happy to live in Canada and have this care, happy so far with my decision to go with North York General, and also its partner for radiation, Odette, Sunnybrook. Glad there’s a team. Several of my doctors have told me that if I need them, not to hesitate to get it touch. One doctor even saying, “just keep bugging my assistant until I get back to you’.  “I can be a real pest’, I warned. “But you’re a nice pest, right?” “The nicest”, I promised. “Then I don’t mind at all”, he said, “but don’t be mean to my assistant Abigail”. I promised that I wouldn’t be mean to Abigail (I assume some people are). He made me feel better just knowing that he’ll be there. Did he sense this need in me, I wonder? Or has he learned from his patients over the years that it is just cancer, the nature of the beast, that makes me feel like a dependent child again, with the doctors as my parents, teachers, babysitters. I read a story about a little boy who was diagnosed with cancer at 4 years old. Three years later, and in remission, when his mother told him that he was going back to see his cancer doctor, the boy was excited, and said, “I’m glad because I love him”. I think cancer patients of all ages can relate, and in that way cancer brings out the child in all of us. We are dependent on our cancer team, just like children are dependent on their parents. If you have cancer, I hope that you have a supportive team..it can make such a difference..if not, you have to advocate for yourself, get pushy, that’s what I do…and good luck!

Wed. Jan 29/25  On these pages I’ve talked about my easy run with breast cancer, I spoke about my personal experience. Today I got the news that a friend is in the hospital in bad shape months after surgery for colorectal cancer, and while awaiting a new liver to replace his cancerous one, which can only happen once he has recovered enough for the second surgery. He is thirty nine years old, with a wife and two year old twin daughters. The news is like a stab to my heart. I sit around preaching that cancer isn’t so bad, considering my current experience with it, but this has taken my breath away. I realize what so many others have to endure with such a diagnosis. I can’t speak about cancer as being an easy run anymore, I just can’t – a disease that hits someone so young with so much to live for…  I hadn’t had much experience with cancer until my diagnosis, I hadn’t witnessed it, personally, the devastation it can wreak on a family.  But with this hitting so close to home, I can see it so clearly now. I will never speak in glowing terms about cancer again…

Jan 26/25  It drives people nuts when I say that getting cancer has been a blessing. And I don’t blame them. Some have watched loved ones suffer terribly and die from the disease, others have cancer themselves and have had a hard road. But I’m obviously only speaking about my own experience to date. Who knows what will happen in my future? I might be in terrible pain, hovering over the edge of a cliff threatening to end it all any day now. But so far all is good! What I mean when I say that cancer has been a blessing for me is in how it has changed my life for the better. Others try to figure out why? “I think it’s because you know you don’t have much time left, so you want to get moving”, one friend mused. “I don’t think so”, I responded, “It doesn’t feel that way”. It felt more like a relief when I was diagnosed with cancer. Maybe because I didn’t have to worry about getting sick anymore, because I already was sick. It now being out of my control, I find it surprisingly easy to let go of the reins. Maybe because I don’t have to fear life anymore, I also don’t fear death, a light at the end of the tunnel. There is an eventual end for all of us and we are all fearful that it might end sooner rather than later. With my diagnosis, I felt humble, mortal, part of the clan, just another human being. I didn’t care about the rat race anymore. I feel fearless. Yes, that’s the word I would use to describe it – fearless. I fired a story off to Modern Love at The New York Times, a story I would never have been brave enough to share before my diagnosis. And I told my son that I wasn’t making the usual Christmas trip to Los Angeles this year because, ‘I just don’t feel like travelling during the Christmas rush’. He was as shocked as I was. Me – always there when my adult children wanted me, putting myself last. Even more amazing, I felt no guilt staying home.

Jan 6/25 I just dumped two friends. The first because she said that I was jealous of Melania Trump. Huh? Even though I have a breast half sliced off from cancer, male pattern baldness and I’m not even male (I hide it with hair extensions), and a broken nose from a fall during a hike in the Cape Breton Highlands in 2018, let me announce for the record, I am not jealous of Melania Trump, and for all of the money in the world, I wouldn’t trade places with her. Would you? The other friend decided to put down every single thing about me. “You just want to be famous”, she accused. Huh? I’ve been a writer for years and a TV news anchor before that, in the public eye since I had a radio gig at the age of 16. It appears to her that nothing I do is right. When I wrote to her merely to say, ‘hey did you watch the Golden Globes last night?”, she replied with wrath, “It was on??? And you didn’t tell me?!!” I’d had enough. I have a history of allowing abusers to be around me, now I want only supportive, positive people – cancer has given me the clarity to identify what I need and what I don’t need, and the courage to insist on it. 

Jan 5/25  I don’t know where it will all end for me, but until it does, me and my cancer will be enjoying life. How much time do I have left? A year? Ten? Twenty? Who knows? Maybe cancer will kill me, maybe not. Only time will tell. Until then, I will really live while I’m alive. And I highly suggest you do the same. After all, you could be the one diagnosed with cancer tomorrow… 

Jan 4/25 I found a new lump in my breast on Christmas Eve, 2024. It was on my operated right breast and I discovered it while applying daily cream to the breast, as ordered by my radiation team at Sunnybrook. It was a hard nodule the size of a pea, and it was terrifying.  This was the first time that I had ever felt a lump in my breast, I hadn’t even detected the original tumour, nor did the surgeon. I had a sleepless night while visions of mastectomies danced in my head. I had already had a lumpectomy, so if there was another tumour, I knew a mastectomy it would be. I struggled thinking about it. Although I had written in the Post that, in the event of a future mastectomy I would go flat, I was now singing a different tune. I looked up plastic surgeons, who do silicon implants immediately after surgery, and pretty much made up my mind on who to use. There are also surgical oncologists who use tissues from other parts of the body to recreate a breast. North York General Hospital has Dr. Fahima Osman, who specializes in such operations called oncoplastic breast surgeries. I was planning my future in the event this this lump was a recurrence of my breast cancer, diagnosed in June, and I had already opted out on going flat. I wanted to do the reconstruction immediately after surgery, instead of waiting and possibly chickening out from going under the knife again. I also discussed this with several friends. Surprisingly, they all said that if they were me, they would go with the full mastectomy. But they were not me, and they weren’t looking mastectomy in the face, like I was.  I had to wait a couple of days before I was able to get an ultrasound from TruNorth Imaging in Thornhill. They were tremendous at getting the results quickly (thank you Nicole), and even though it was the holidays, I had the results for January 3rd when I had a scheduled appointment with the delightful and brilliant Dr. Hany Saliman at the Odessa Breast Cancer Radiation Clinic (Sunnybrook). The report noted that the nodule was considered benign, less than 2% chance of cancer, while my previous mammogram before surgery had ominously predicted more than 95% likely cancer. Dr. Hany told me that it felt benign as well, but if I hadn’t arrived with an ultrasound result, he would have ordered one. “We can’t be too careful”, he told me, adding, “it’s so important to treat cancer early, it’s the difference between life and death”. He mentioned that I should be prepared to have every single tiny lump in the future tested. “To keep you safe”, he said. 

Jan. 10/25 Overexposure – what’s the deal with the hospital gowns in the breast cancer clinics? My first day at the NYGH clinic, I was a babe in the woods. After being escorted into the examining room, I jumped on the ‘bed’, while I waited for the surgeon and his team to arrive. When they waltzed in, the doc said, “Oh, ‘you’re sitting there, but that’s ok, you would have ended up there anyway.” So maybe I was supposed to take a seat? But we all knew why we were here, so in the interest of saving time, I raised my shirt and sports bra, and announced, “Well, here they are”. I thought I heard a gasp, or two, but the doc didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, here they are”, he said, “you didn’t see any changes, nothing suspicious, right?”.  I nodded. “Neither do I”, he said, adding, “do you mind if I touch?”  “If you dare”, I told him, as he came towards me with his index and middle finger extended. “You didn’t feel anything either, right?”. “Right”, I replied. “But your doctor wrote that he felt something, he must be really good”, he added. “He thinks he is”, I quipped. The next time I came into the clinic, I was immediately escorted into the dressing room, and handed the blue hospital gown, before I could cause any more trouble. I came out with it tied loosely in the front. “Miss Dunn”, it ties in the back”, an attendant scolded me,  “you have to go into the dressing room and turn it around.” Ties in the back? She must be kidding. “Is this an ass clinic?”, I asked her. “No, it’s a breast clinic”, she said. “Then why does it open in the back”, I wanted to know. It made no sense at all. How is the doctor going to get to the breast? Through the sleeve? Case in point. After radiation one day, I was sent to see a resident to ensure that I wasn’t having a reaction from the treatment. I was told to leave the hospital gown on, not to get into my street clothes. Once in the examining room, the young resident came in and made conversation. “Do you want to see my breast?”, I asked, cutting to the chase, knowing full well that was the reason he was in the room. He nodded. I leaned down and pulled up the ‘gown’ from below my knee – high, higher. Oh god, I was wearing a thong and nothing else! Now, at my breast level, and completely naked on the right side of my body, I was as red as a beet. “Close your eyes”, I gasped to the resident. He slammed them shut. “Turn around”, I ordered. He turned around. I tried to maneuver the gown so that only the breast in question was exposed. He turned back to see the one breast poking out, with everything else wrapped up in blue around it, then he hightailed it out of the room. I couldn’t blame him. If I had changed into my street clothes, as I had suggested, I could have just opened my blouse and exposed my breast…but apparently that’s too much like after cocktail hour on a Saturday night in a dingy and dark bar. Or so I’ve heard. My surgeon has solved the problem in his office with short, ‘paper’ blue tops that open in the centre and you can expose the breast needed for inspection, right or left. Although it’s a short style, that resembles Chanel, but only slightly, it is still, appropriately, highly unattractive and thus perfect for the clinical setting. Hopefully, I’ve just saved you the embarrassment I went through while over exposing in unfamiliar territory. 

Feb. 10/25 I have told my sons Luke and Jay that if things go badly and I end up terminal in a hospital or hospice somewhere, I need a limitless supply of beer and banana splits. I stopped drinking beer a number of years ago, and I havn’t had a banana split for ages, but still that’s what came to mind as my greatest need for when I reach my end of days. I wonder if death by beer and banana splits can be considered assisted suicide? 

Jan 6/25 I am just a kid from Canada with breast cancer, and it doesn’t feel bad at all. No pain during the lumpectomy surgery, an easy run with radiation, and the anti hormone pills that are rumoured to cause all kinds of nasty side effects, including reduced libido? Well, let’s just say, so far, they’re not working 🙂 Speaking of which, I got into a relationship recently. Havn’t been in one of those for a very long time. Didn’t want one, had enough of that and everything else that goes along with it. But another side effect of cancer, I wanted love and heady days again. I’ve had two, well, kind of, three marriages. But why have I insisted on being alone all of these years since, I wonder? Cancer made me think, ‘what am I waiting for’? So here is cancer calling the shots and changing my life for the better. And life is better with love and everything else that goes along with it. 🥰