Five Years, Four Moves, Two Cancers, One Clean Bill of Health

Five years (half a decade!) ago today, on October 18, 2021, I wrote my first post on this online journal. I didn’t write about the diagnosis itself. I wrote about trust.

My honey had just cut my hair again, as he’d been doing every few months since the pandemic kept us close to home. The next day, I was to get my first chemo and Herceptin infusion. I had never met my oncologist in person; only a referral, a name, a plan. I didn’t know what else to do with that kind of uncertainty, so I did the only thing that has ever reliably helped me think: I wrote. I chose, I said then, to trust the process: my surgeon’s referral, my oncologist’s expertise, the outcome, whatever it turned out to be.

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

— Flannery O’Connor

If you’ve been following along on my journey, you’ll recall that I’d been diagnosed that July, 2021, with invasive breast carcinoma, stage 1, Nottingham grade 1, the kind of news I took, at first, the way I take any diagnosis: a physical condition to learn about and deal with. A blip.

Then came the successful lumpectomy that September, and with it a post-op lab report that drew the short straw: triple positive, meaning my cancer cells carried all three receptors (estrogen, progesterone, and HER2), a biology that offered cancer the perfect playground. My breast surgeon didn’t think I’d need chemo, but a medical oncologist thought differently. He said I needed chemo for twelve weeks, Herceptin every three weeks for a year, radiation, and hormone therapy for a decade after. I started the treatments the next day, October 19.

A friend, Judi, commented on that very first post, curious and cheering me on as she saw me shift from what she called my “traditional ‘hero’ approach to life.” I replied that indeed I was pivoting “from slaying dragons to awakening my inner muses”—already, even in that first post, I knew exactly what I was setting out to do.

I called this journal My Heroine’s Journey as a deliberate nod, and a quiet contrast, to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and to the Jungian psychology behind it. Where the hero rides out to conquer something external, the heroine’s journey turns inward. I didn’t want to chronicle a battle. I wanted to chronicle an unfolding: of feelings, of decisions, of whatever this experience might be teaching me about myself, in real time, in public, in case any of it might help someone else standing where I once stood.

I haven’t posted in almost six months. Life—in the form of yet another move—got loud enough to crowd out writing. But today felt like the right day to come back, especially for the distant friends who make up most of my readership and who may be wondering, quietly, how the story turned out.

The part I haven’t told you yet

Three months ago, I sat across from my oncologist here in Vancouver, and he gave me a clean bill of health.

His pronouncement did not really surprise me, yet the words were a relief to hear. I let them sink in… and I left his clinic doing my happy dance!

There’s one more PET scan to be scheduled for this fall, just to be thorough, and I’ll continue taking tamoxifen.

It wasn’t a straight road to here. You may also recall that not long after the breast cancer, a second concern appeared: a tumor in my eye, first identified back in Manila. My oncologist there and the ocular oncologist disagreed on how to proceed, so I waited and brought the question to Vancouver instead, first to a retina specialist who then referred me to one of the top ocular oncologists in North America. Even she couldn’t say for certain whether it was a new melanoma or an unlikely metastasis from the breast cancer, but she treated it as melanoma, with brachytherapy, a treatment the Philippines didn’t have available at all.

Two cancers. One journal. And, as of three months ago, a clean bill of health on both fronts.

The life that kept happening around it

The original diagnosis happened in Manila, in the middle of the pandemic, which is its own layer of strange to sit with, the kind of global upheaval that makes a personal one feel both smaller and, somehow, more acute.

About four years ago my soulmate and I began to let go of most of the “stuff” we had accumulated living in Asia since 1985 and just over three years ago moved back to British Columbia. Why the decision to repatriate? Mostly, it was simple arithmetic: after thirty-some years on the same medical insurance plan in Asia, the premiums had climbed past what made sense, and we’d already drawn down a large chunk of our savings on co-pays. Canada’s universal healthcare wasn’t a lesser option—it was the responsible one.

Since landing back in Vancouver, we’ve moved three times. The first move was within the city itself; after a year another; and this summer, a third—into what I can only describe as an extraordinary stroke of luck: an in-law suite with a view to the Fraser River that still makes me pinch myself most mornings. I’ve written before about how places seem to find us rather than the other way around. It happened again. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop being amazed by that.

The last several months, if I’m honest, were simply the unglamorous work of finding a place, packing it, moving it, and unpacking it all over again. Not exactly the stuff of a gripping journal entry. But it’s also just… life, continuing, alongside everything else.

Who I’ve become in the meantime

Health and homes aren’t the whole story of these five years, though. Before any of this began, I’d spent years as a “thinking partner” to solopreneurs building online businesses, and as a “book sherpa” guiding authors toward self-publishing—the latest chapter of a career that had earlier taken me through international trade and non-profit work. These days, I’m mostly retired from that work (a few coaching clients still knock every now and then; I’m pleased to help), and the free space it opened up has filled in unexpected ways: I now serve as a director on the board of the Philippine-based Carl Jung Circle Center, and I am editing/formatting a friend’s autobiography.

Since landing, I’ve also bonded more closely with family and old friends here, and I’ve stayed in close touch with friends scattered across the world through zoom calls, chats, and social media. I’ve been a world traveler long enough to know the discipline of staying in touch across distance and time zones; it’s just a whole lot easier now than it was back in the years of letter-writing and annual newsletters.

And through it all, there’s been my soulmate. “I adore my life with you!” is a phrase I find myself saying often, and meaning every time. We e-bike, we hike, we chase photographs, we take to the road whenever we can. We laugh daily.

If the cancer years taught me anything in the background, it may be this: how much I don’t take any of that for granted.

Most recently, I’ve started attending a journaling circle called the Legacy Circle; a group built around capturing the stories and wisdom worth passing on before they’re lost to time. It’s already become fodder for reflections I haven’t fully written yet, and some of what comes next in this journal may wander a little further from health and a little closer to legacy, memory, and the stories I’m inspired to tell about my life.

The question I still can’t answer

Somewhere in those very first posts, five years ago, I asked myself whether cancer would change me. I still don’t have an answer. I’m not sure I will for a while yet; some questions take longer to answer than others, and this might be one that needs the distance I don’t have yet.

But I wanted you to know, today, on this fifth anniversary: I’m here, I’m well, and the story—my story—is far from finished. That’s one for another day.

“You must remember that your story matters. What you write has the power to save a life, sometimes that life is your own.”

— Stalina Goodwin

If you’ve been quietly following along without ever (or seldom) saying hello, today’s as good a day as any. Drop a line below. I’d be delighted to know who’s still here and to hear what’s up with you.

P.S. I don’t post on any schedule, only when I feel I have something worth saying. If you’d rather not miss it when I do, there’s a spot to sign up for updates in the top right corner.