Like Mother, like daughter

In December 2013, 31-year-old Jenny McCaig of Cobourg, who does middays at STAR 93.3 FM and is traffic manager for Pineridge Broadcasting, received the news no one wants to hear: that she has breast cancer - the disease that had claimed her mother's life after a diagnosis at a similar age. She will be sharing her journey back to health with Northumberland Today readers in a regular column which will run every two weeks if her treatment schedule permits.

"Friends, and if we’re lucky our families, give us the courage to lift the blinds on our hearts… to open up and show what we generally keep hidden from the rest of the world."

That’s why from the get-go I decided that I would be honest with all my friends and family: the good, the bad and the ugly. And now I'm sharing my story with you. Why? you may be asking yourself. Because my mom couldn't….

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33, passing at age 38. Her cancer turned into bone cancer and eventually spread to other organs. She was sick from when I was five years old and passed when I was only eight. But that was also in 1990, and we've come a long way since then!

On Nov. 29, 2013 I went for what I thought would be a general check up - my yearly mammogram and ultrasound and possibly MRI; appointments that had become so run of the mill since I had been getting them since the age of 17. It wasn’t until two years ago I really had my first scare when I had my first biopsy. It turned out benign… but that didn’t mean it wasn’t scary. So this time, when they wanted to pull me in for another biopsy (right away this time, I thought - not even given enough time to let my fiance Jay know!) and then they saw the same thing this time, I was pretty confident that all was okay - but there was a deep-down gut feeling that told me otherwise.

Dec. 5, 2013 I got the news that changed my life as I knew it. And my entire group of friends' and family's lives in turn. At the age of 31 I was told I was positive for breast cancer.

At first I called my stepmom Kay. But it was going to be another week before I could tell my dad face to face, something that was important for me to do. And also the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. But that night I waited for Jay to get home from work (he hardly ever runs late, but of course this night he was!) and again, another hard conversation. I felt like every time I told someone they thought I was going to tell them something positive. Same thing went for Jay. From there I told the rest of my family and then from there all of my friends, using Facebook as my portal. I had finally let the “world” in on my secret. That was Dec. 9, 2013, with my surgery scheduled only two short days away, on Dec. 11, 2013. I ended up getting a lumpectomy and some lymph nodes removed on my right breast.

Dr. Andrew Stratford, my surgeon, was confident it was something called DCIS. That means basically that it was contained to the ducts of my breasts. He was surprised when it ended up actually being invasive cancer. Therefore they were taking a proactive approach of four months of chemo, followed by six weeks of radiation, followed by a pill I will take called taxmoxfin for five years, up to 10, since my breast cancer is also based hormonal. I am now going into my third round of chemo.

Finally, some good news about a month ago when I found out news that even surprised my genealogist: I didn’t have the breast cancer gene! How was that? Here my story lines up perfectly with my mother's. And here I was prepared to do a double mastectomy and the whole nine yards - possibly recovering from all of that in a couple more years. Needless to say a long road, and one I wasn’t looking forward to. My gut wasn’t right this time! Ha ha! Now my genealogist has set up another test to test for the gene of other cancers. It is waiting on approval from the health ministry, which can sometimes take up to six months! So we wait… again. This whole journey is a bunch of weeks at a time, always sitting and waiting, not knowing what the next will be or where it will take you. It's often the unknown that is usually the scariest….

But you know, I was pretty confident from the get-go that everything would be okay. It had something to do with a dream my stepmom Kay had. But you'll have to wait to hear about that until next time.

For now, if you know of something in your family's medical history, go get yourself checked. Because the one thing I know is that the earlier the detection, the better! It wasn’t caught earlier enough for my mother, but because I stayed on top of it, getting checked saved my life!