The Five Year Plan

September 24, 2009

A lot of people talk about their “Five Year Plan”: where they want to be in five years, what they want to have accomplished, how much money or what position at work they’ll have, and so on. From there, they go to a Ten Year Plan that works off their five: if in 5 years you’ve got 10 thousand saved, in 10 years you’ll have 20…

I am one of those people, too, I talk about the 5 and 10 year plans. And I just hit my 5 year plan: it’s been five years since I told myself “in five years, Ann you WILL be alive.”

Which sounds pretty macabre and a bit over the top dramatic, but when you’re a cancer survivor, that kind of drama becomes every day life.

This past March was five years from the month that a doctor told me I had breast cancer. Really, he said “This is a breast cancer”--his exact words still burn in my memory. Those words hit me like a hail of bullets. My world caved in, crashed, blew up, froze, cratered, insert-your-favorite-demolition-verbiage-here. I would rather he had said something else, anything else, you have warts, you are ugly, time for a colonoscopy.  Anything.

But any of those millions of worries I used to have that seemed so critical if not more likely for a young mother with kids under age 5 to endure were erased in an instant: hemorrhoids or sagging breasts or early on-set wrinkles, poof gone. He said “breast cancer”, and suddenly everything else I’d worried about as a potential medical issue sounded laughable, really ridiculous. And surreality sunk in: my breast could kill me now.

I endured surgery and the loss of both of my breasts (one prophylactically), chemotherapy that sucked the cancer and the life out of me, radiation (the burning-skin-around-my-scarring kind) to wipe out any extra little cancer cells growing under cover, and all the endless check-ups, the anti-cancer recipes, the many vitamins, that one return-cancer-scare and all the exercise I could get from there, to here.

And here is 5 years later.

In the cancer world, five years past cancer is the first big milestone. It’s the initial indicator that all that hell and change and growth and loss and tears and fear and hope you’ve been through has actually done something; it’s kept you alive. 

So every year at this time I celebrate the fact that life is not a guarantee and that some times in some lives you actually have to fight for yours. 

This year, of course, it will be even more excessive: because I’ve hit that milestone that leans me toward a hopeful belief that the cancer won’t come back. The cancer docs say if you make it to five years, then ten years, and five years after that etcetera, you’re in good shape. They can’t guarantee that it won’t come back, though, which is what I really want to hear. But that’s impossible to predict, once a body has proved a place that cancer can live there’s no telling what will happen. Still, my doctor says this first five years is a great sign. So I’ll take that sign and run with it. 

And this year, I know I am one of too-many-thousand women who are celebrating their successful 5 year plan, all those faceless women I don’t know and never will but whom I feel so close to I could call them sister-- and in some cases brother, because men get breast cancer too. So this year, I celebrate for all of us. 

And I think of all the breast cancer patients whose plans didn’t work out, and who didn’t make it here, and who tried their hardest but still, their five year plan didn’t work. And I get a mix of fear and gratitude, and confusion, and wonder that my five year plan did. This year I’m sure I’ll cry a little--for them, for me, and for all of us who are mixed up in this cancer confusion. It’s been a long time, you’d think I would be used to it, but some days I still can’t believe it happened to me.

This year marks my fifth year anniversary of my diagnosis with breast cancer—and I’m still here to talk about it. That’s a Five Year Plan achieved.

Now, onto the Ten Year Plan.

Comments

[Denise]

I am a winner two,i discovery desease level 1 in 2008 ,suver two surgery and take booth of my breast,this year my mother discorey same kind of cancer and we fint together, thks by your history.

By Denise - Florianópolis- Brasil

[inez]

atta girl... congratulations ann!

:o)