Chicken Soup for the Breast Cancer Survivor's Soul

  First Week: “A Travelogue and Some Tea.”

  Second Week: “Two Turtle Doves.”

  Third Week: “Three French Hens”—a box découpaged with three chickens and filled with Snickers bars.

  Fourth Week: “Four Caring Words”—a homemade pillow with the words “Strength,” “Friends,” “Love” and “Family.”

  Fifth Week: “Five Gold Rings”—five gold wine charms.

  Sixth Week: “Six Things Worth Saying”—a beautiful framed copper and metal art piece with the words “Go for it,” “Enjoy life,” “Expect miracles,” “Why not,” “Simplify everything” and “Dream big” engraved on metal touch stones/coins.

  Seventh Week: “Seven Swans A-Swimming”—a stitched art piece with seven matronly women in swim suits (which Chris promised did not resemble us!).

  Eighth Week: “Eight Malts a Milking”—a lovely basket filled with eight packages of malt balls.

  Ninth Week: “Nine Crumbcakes Crumbling”—nine homemade, delicious crumbcakes.

  Tenth Week: “Ten Pipers Piping”—a small bowl with ten copper pipes artfully attached to a water pump to create an original water fountain.

  Eleventh Week: “Eleven Flames a Dancing”—an elegant votive stand with eleven candles arranged vertically.

  Twelfth Week: “Twelve Tins A-Keeping”—a magnetic board with twelve magnetic tins with lids attached. The lids were decorated with pictures of my children.

  For the twelfth and final chemo treatment, in addition to “Twelve Tins A-Keeping,” Chris made me a “courage doll” using wire and fibers from a piece of Tibetan prayer cloth she had long treasured. Her note said,

  This doll represents courage and strength. It represents you. The fibers are strong and beautiful. They protectively wrap the form, yet leave room for growth. The wire gives it shape, yet it is flexible when needed. The doll is wrapped in a piece of the prayer cloth to remind you that you are not alone and will always be in my prayers.

  As if all this weren’t enough to let me know I was loved and supported, when I had to have a mastectomy following chemo, Chris made me my own personal voodoo doll complete with pins.

  Wandering around my house, nearly a year since my diagnosis and six months since my last treatment, everywhere I see signs of Chris’s support. How much love and time must she have spent thinking, creating, designing and delivering—all to make me feel her friendship.

  Many say you learn a lot about your true friends when you go through an experience like this, but I think it’s slightly different. I don’t believe it’s a “test” of friendship— I believe that all my friends are true friends who happen to show their support in different ways. What I learned is really two-fold: first, the capacity for love in this world is immense; second, there are some extraordinary souls who, like Chris, have an amazing gift to give and are so generous of nature, but so shy of praise, that they are only truly appreciated in times of trouble. I don’t think I have yet been able to convey to Chris how truly healing all her thoughtful gifts were, how they touched my heart to the core and gave me strength. One of our mutual friends had worried that her humorous approach might not be appropriate, but Chris knew how important laughter and love are to healing and coping, and she found just the right mix to help me feel cared for, but not smothered; honored but not pitied; lifted up but not carried.

  Sally Fouché

  My Life

  If I could live my life over,

  I’d do some things differently.

  I’d play more, laugh more and love more,

  And allow myself to be free.

  I’d do more to and for others

  As I’d like done to and for me.

  I’d forgive myself more often,

  I’d give more and do more freely.

  I’d practice more relaxation,

  Listen to what the body says.

  I’d smell more flowers, see more trees,

  Include more nature in my days.

  I’d worry less about neatness

  And how other people see me.

  I’d ease up far more on strictness

  And live life spontaneously.

  I’d thank people far more often

  And thank God for all that is me.

  I can’t live my life all over,

  So I’ll be the most I can be.

  Kathy Chamberlin

  Payback Time

  Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

  Leo Tolstoy

  When I was told I had breast cancer, I never dreamed I would live long enough to write about it thirty-six years later. In my case, my doctor wasn’t optimistic even if I had a mastectomy. The news was devastating, of course. I was forty-three and still had a lot of living to do. How could I handle it? How would my friends and family handle it? Should I even tell anyone? And if I did, could I tolerate their uncomfortable expressions of sympathy and clumsy attempts to comfort me with words like, “I know you’ll be just fine”?

  And every time I saw people whispering, I was sure they were whispering about “poor Lee.” For one year, five years or whatever time I had left, I did not want to spend it being pathetic! I never needed sympathy before. I was raised with love, humor and optimism in an upper-middle-class family, and was fortunate enough to have two careers of my own choosing. In the first, the music business, I was an advance publicist and agent for name bands such as Tommy Dorsey and Ray Anthony. My second career was in advertising.

  Now I was challenged to put my creative skills to work in the most important campaign of my life. I realized it was up to me, and only me, to set the stage so everyone could be at relative ease with my situation. I knew that moods are contagious. By conveying that I was optimistic and upbeat, my attitude could permeate to those around me. It worked. No longer did people tiptoe around the subject of my surgery.

  After my mastectomy, I recovered quickly and actually went to a Falcons/Steelers football game six days after surgery, then to work the day after that. The more I came back to the real world after the “worry world,” the more I realized I had a debt to pay for my life.

  I made sure I had regular mammograms, and five years later I needed another mastectomy. The test had caught the problem early, and my prognosis was excellent.

  I contacted our local American Cancer Society (ACS) to find out how I could help. They suggested I go door-to-door in my apartment building to solicit contributions. I discovered that the previous year the “grand” sum of twenty-seven dollars was collected from 120 apartments.

  Certainly, there had to be a more fruitful way!

  By the grace of God and a few glasses of wine with friends, I was able to think of a much better way to raise money for the ACS. I went door-to-door inviting my neighbors to a cocktail party at my apartment. The minimum contribution was five dollars. I added, “I’ll gladly accept more.”

  Result: $325 and the beginning of my thirty-six years of benefits for the American Cancer Society. It was also the beginning of neighborhood parties throughout Atlanta— and, eventually, Georgia—these replaced the time-worn, ineffective door-to-door solicitations.

  After the first year, I moved to a larger condominium complex, and the parties grew. After the fourteenth year, they had gotten so large that I had to have them at the complex clubhouse that could accommodate the 300 or more people who attended.

  Among the hors d’oeuvres I made for my first party were meatballs. Everyone loved them, so they became a tradition, and I considered them a good-luck omen. The first year I made one hundred meatballs, but as the parties grew, so did the number of balls. The following years, making them became a party unto itself. My friends would gather around the dining-room table where I had placed a thirty-pound mixture of raw meat and seasonings. As they rolled and rolled, I cooked and cooked up to 1,000 meatballs! My friends ended up with soft hands from the fat in the meat, and I ended up splattered. We h
ad a great time!

  The other food and liquor were donated. Local sports celebrities volunteered as bartenders. Musicians and entertainers offered their talents freely, and all expenses were kept to a minimum. By then, the minimum donation had grown to twenty-five dollars (I would still accept more), and everyone thought it a great bargain. The word went around Atlanta, “It’s the best deal in town . . . and the most fun!”

  The affair was no longer just a neighborhood party. The crowd was well-diversified and included senators, members of Congress, and our mayor—who all showed up in election years!

  After twenty-eight years of “partying” and $291,000 in Atlanta for the American Cancer Society, I moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia, where I am volunteer chairman of neighborhood parties in our county. During the eight years I’ve lived here, my parties alone have raised approximately $85,000.

  Sometimes I sit back and reflect how different things would have been had I not had cancer. Well . . . the Cancer Society would have missed more than $376,000, and I would have missed all those wonderful parties and the generous people who attended them.

  But most of all, I would have missed the deep appreciation of simply being alive.

  Lee Scheinman

  You’re Gonna Eat That?

  Ifeel like I’m fighting a battle when I didn’t start a war.

  Dolly Parton

  In case you’re wondering where to hook up with a bunch of breast cancer survivors, you may find them in the natural-foods section of the supermarket, scouring labels for traces of soy.

  Like beauty queens who are expected to uphold the standards of the pageant as they travel the world on their goodwill tours, breast-cancer survivors are often expected to be paragons of healthy eating. I flinched before bacon and smoked meats for a long time after my diagnosis, muttering such things as “unclean!” and pulling my shawl tighter around my face like a vampire at the first streaks of dawn.

  In fact, one of the first things I did while under the influence of the steroids I got along with chemo was to throw out everything in my kitchen. “I don’t know what poisoned me, but I’m getting rid of it!” I said in my steroid-induced, three A.M. frenzy. Never mind that breast cancer can strike even if you’re mainlining phytoestrogens; I had to blame something, and closest at hand were frying pans encrusted with what I believed to be carcinogenic evidence. I admit now it is much more likely that I simply wanted to justify a spending spree at Williams-Sonoma.

  Breast-cancer survivors are attracted to the idea of impeccable eating habits mainly because we feel betrayed by our bodies. But there’s pressure on us from other sources as well, thanks to that famous study of Japanese women who, when they moved to Hawaii and changed their diet to a fast-food American one, developed a higher incidence of breast cancer. We still don’t know precisely what in an American diet produced this effect (although I’d put my money on “supersizing”), and we don’t know for sure precisely what about their former diets may have protected the women. Although everyone assumes it’s soy, I’m hopeful it’s the tempura.

  The initial rush to culinary perfection can be very heady. For six months, I was a vegan, which is a vegetarian who doesn’t eat . . . well, who doesn’t eat anything. No meat, fish, eggs, dairy—just a lot of tofu pies disguised as chicken and visits to a particular restaurant where everything on the menu was in quotes, like “cheeseburger” or “BLT.”

  Being a vegan was not onerous for the time I was devoted to it. What was more annoying than a life without cheese was when I went back to normal eating and other people looked at me like, “You had breast cancer, and you’re gonna eat THAT?” Just as politicians are expected to be monogamous and movie stars are expected to roll out of bed perfectly beautiful, breast-cancer survivors are expected to set a culinary example. And the people criticizing us are often the ones with steak juice running down their chins.

  I think it’s because they’ve displaced their own fears on us about getting cancer. Everyone wants a talisman to ward off disease, and just as it was easier to blame my cancer on my kitchen equipment or eating habits, people are comforted to think we can control our fates through healthy eating.

  Unfortunately, vegetarians get breast cancer, too, so this theory is not without its holes. But human nature persists. The next time you order something doused in butter and someone gives you the evil eye, tell them to go sit on a rice cake and mind their own business. Even beauty queens only have to serve for a year. Then they get to live the way they want, with or without a tiara always on their heads like a halo.

  Jami Bernard

  As previously appeared in

  Mamm Magazine

  Another Kind of Miracle

  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

  Helen Keller

  It was a beautiful, clear spring day when Laura, my best friend for the last ten years, called to say she was dying. “The doctors say it’s in my brain now, and it won’t take much longer.”

  Thirty-seven years old, the mother of two young children, and the doctors were right. She died the following November.

  “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way!” I shouted at God. “Laura should have had a miracle. Damn it, she deserved a miracle.”

  She was first diagnosed with breast cancer at thirty-two, a shockingly young age for such a vicious disease. The younger you are, the more virulent the cancer. When Laura first told me her news, I, being a published writer, sat down to write an inspirational novel for her.

  In my novel, she was a character who’d had cancer many years before, a strong and resilient woman who’d beaten the odds and survived.

  Although I may still finish that novel even though Laura didn’t make it, I soon put the novel aside and embarked on a more practical plan. Along with Jamie Miller, another friend of Laura’s, I began to work on collecting stories of Christmas miracles. Not only would a collection of Christmas miracle tales find an audience, I thought, but it would also bring in some money for Laura and her husband.

  Jamie and I interviewed many people who had experienced miracles at Christmastime, and then we wrote up their stories. Laura kept track of the administrative end of the project, and we produced a book for William Morrow, Christmas Miracles: Magical True Stories of Modern Day Miracles, that became a national bestseller.

  How wonderful it was to be able to spread the word about the incredible things that can happen when we open our hearts and believe. Interview after interview convinced me miracles are everywhere, if you just open your eyes to the mystery of life.

  I had a secret goal during the miracle book project. I believed with all my heart that if Laura was involved in this miracle project, if she lived and breathed the idea of miracles day in and day out, if she helped to spread the word that miracles can and do happen, then she, too, would be given a miracle. The hand of God was everywhere in these tales. We believed that same hand would reach down to allow her to stay with her children, to be the mother they needed her to be.

  Our one Christmas book turned into a series of five books on miracles. But all the while, as our books grew more popular and we gathered more tales of miracles, Laura grew sicker. Five years after she was first diagnosed, she died.

  In the months following Laura’s death, I was furious with God. Why, after all of the good that she had done in her life, did God allow her to die? Why didn’t she get her miracle?

  The answer came to me on another clear spring morning, an eerie twin to the day that Laura had called with her devastating news the year before. As I looked out my office window at the blooming azaleas, the astra lilies hanging heavy from the weight of their flowers, I suddenly realized that there had been a miracle for Laura after all: I hadn’t noticed the miracle of the last few years because it wasn’t the one I wanted.

  I wanted Laura to live. That was what I was asking from God, and anything less was unacceptable. But God knew all along that Laura would die, so God ga
ve her the miracle she would need. She would need help with her children, so he gave her a circle of friends who would pitch in. She and her husband would need help with their finances, so he sent the miracle books project and allowed her to earn an income that would not require her to spend time away from her children in her final years of life. She would not live long, so he gave her a way to have an impact far greater than most people have in their first three decades. Her name will live on in her books, and even after her death she will continue to inspire others in their time of need.

  God gave her the miracle she needed, even if it wasn’t the one I wanted. I am grateful that I finally saw it.

  Jennifer Basye Sander

  The Snapshot

  A wonderful snapshot was taken during the 1998 Pittsburgh Race for the Cure. The picture speaks of all the raw emotions felt by survivors who participated. There is sadness and joy that only we survivors understand. I was in the picture, and it has been used for publicity for the race. The funny part of the whole story is that the only thing you see of me is the back of my head. The person I was embracing was never recognized. They were able to contact me because my name was on my back.