Fear, Hope and Faith

By Alicia Biedermann

there are many life lessons that cancer has taught me, but the most valuable is that you must be your own advocate and, maybe most importantly, listen to your body.
At the age of 12, I found my first lump in my right breast by accident. This lump was not cancerous but provided a crash course in breast health at a young age. Finding that lump scared me, and I began doing self-exams every month in the shower. It was during one of these exams that, 25 years later, I found a lump in my left breast. Thinking it couldn’t possibly be something to worry about, I waited until the next month when I did my exam again and realized it felt different, and bigger…much bigger.

My first diagnosis was in April 2018, stage 2 HER2-positive breast cancer. It is numbing to hear “You have cancer,” and a myriad of questions rush through your mind. How could this happen to me, a 37-year-old that ate healthily, ran and swam six days a week, with no genetic or family history of the disease? Would I need to quit my job, a job I am proud of at my family’s business, George W. Lowry, Inc.? Perhaps most concerning, was the disease going to take me away from my husband, Scott, and our three children, Brody, nine; Reyna, eight; and Emery, seven? Would I be able to see them grow up or worse, would they grow up too fast because of this? Unable to find any answers, I started my own blog, her2andyou.com. My hope was that it would offer other women with this same sub-type of cancer a place to find answers and see what breast cancer looked like beyond the pink ribbon.

After nine surgeries, including a double mastectomy, and 17 rounds of chemotherapy, I was deemed cancer free. I should have been excited, but I kept having this feeling that something was not right. It was a persistent feeling and so, after months of asking for imaging to be done, I was able to get a CT scan in June 2019. The scan verified the cancer had returned. The doctors explained my cancer was “a little more aggressive” than most and had continued to grow and spread through chemotherapy. I honestly do not know which is harder, hearing you have cancer the first time or hearing your cancer came back.

With family and friends rallying around me, I started the journey all over again just one month after finishing the first. This new diagnosis, though terrifying, stage 3 metastatic, brought a shimmer of hope. My staging opened the door to a new combination immunotherapy/chemotherapy medication that would be administered at the same time as radiation and had been approved by the FDA only the month before. So, after three more surgeries, 25 rounds of radiation and an additional 14 rounds of the new chemotherapy, I was once again deemed cancer free toward the end of 2020.

Thanks to advances in medicine and more specialized treatment plans, many of us, though not enough, get to hear the words “cancer free.” However, you are never actually free of cancer. Once you’re told that the cancer is gone, a new journey begins, filled with agonizing fear that the cancer has returned with every ache and pain felt. I have body scans twice a year to search for any evidence of disease and in January of this year I had to have a hysterectomy after findings from these scans. Thankfully, after surgery we found out it wasn’t cancer, but these moments never end.

I hate cancer, I really do, but I am thankful for what cancer has taught me. I know now that if something feels off, don’t wait to see a doctor. If someone tells you no and you keep feeling like there is something wrong, find someone that will listen. I believe if I had not been my own advocate, I would not be here today. As a result, I have been able to watch all three of my kids graduate from elementary school; our son will graduate from high school this year and start college next fall. I have been able to attend all three of my kids’ water polo games, even traveling to Hawaii and Hungary to watch them play for USA Water Polo’s National Team. This year Scott and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary and we can’t wait to celebrate more.

It is these moments that make everything I endured so worth it. Cancer took a lot away from me, but it was never able to take away my hope for a cure, my desire to live each day filled with joy, or my everlasting love for my family.