By Allison Vitsky Sallmon
In 2003, I was many things — 33 years old, a postdoctoral fellow at a Boston-area university, a veterinary researcher, a scuba diver, and a workout fanatic. What I wasn’t, was someone with a lot of free time. So on the October day that I placed my hand on my left breast and found a distinct mass, I was more annoyed than frightened. Still, instinct told me to get it checked, so I made an appointment at the student health care center. The consultation only heightened my irritation — my doctor looked me in the eye and told me that he was not convinced I had a mass at all — and that I was too young to have breast cancer anyway.
The rest of the exchange went a bit like this: I informed the physician that I was 100 percent sure there was something in my breast, that I didn’t have time for this nonsense, and that I would be referred for a closer evaluation or I would become the bane of his practice. It was a good thing he took me at my word, because in the end, my busy schedule didn’t matter, nor did my age or anyone’s assumption that the mass was benign. The fact was, I had high-grade invasive breast cancer.
I was near the end of my fellowship and had recently begun interviewing for positions at several local companies. I hastily accepted a job with great health care coverage and seriously pondered life beyond the studying that had defined me for so long. How do I break the news to my family? Should I pursue genetic testing? And did I want to have children (because if I did, I needed to see a fertility specialist immediately since treatment could wipe out my ovaries)? What if I couldn’t beat this monster?
There was an abrupt shift in my personal relationships — several of my closest friends, unable to handle the news of my diagnosis, essentially disappeared off the map (years later at a dinner party, a woman I’d been dear friends with who’d abruptly vanished during my year of treatment asked me in rapt amazement, “Wait, you had chemo? Your HAIR fell out?”). Perhaps one of the most isolating events was my orientation visit to the oncology clinic: My mom had flown in to attend with me, and everyone immediately assumed that she was the patient — because I was the youngest customer in the room by about 20 years. Thankfully, I discovered the Young Survival Coalition, an organization dedicated to supporting women under 40 with breast cancer; within 2 weeks of my first email to them, I had a local network of women my age who were there to give advice, hold my hand, and act as cheerleaders (only far more spirited than you’d find on any football field). Trust me, when you’re feeling terrified, few things are more cheering than having a friend flash you with her fabulously reconstructed chest and quip, “You, too, will soon fill out any bikini tops you choose!”
Four weeks later, I sat — still stunned and scared, but resolute — in the infusion ward at Mass General, aware that my life was about to change drastically and forever. As a nurse approached me with the chemotherapy drugs that would kill the breast cancer cells (along, unfortunately, with the cells lining my hair follicles and my intestines), I made a hasty promise to myself: I am not going to let this ruin my life. I will keep working, I will keep diving, I will keep going to the gym, I will support the other people I meet who are fighting this stupid disease, and — most importantly of all — I will never, ever have a “bad hair” day again.
I kept most of those promises, although alas, I am still plagued by bad hair days. I worked and went to the gym all the way through my treatment, more than a little pleased to discover that there are many people in the world who harbor a crush on Lieutenant Ilia (a gorgeous bald female navigator in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture). I became active with the Young Survival Coalition, participating in support meetings, Q&A panels, and fundraising events. And once I was fully recovered, I bought myself a dry suit, which greatly expanded my diving options. I was a SURVIVOR (note the all-caps) and I thought about beating cancer every day.
The Five-Year Mark
Five years later, I was still doing well, and my doctors were very positive about my long-term prognosis. I took a job in California so I could dive comfortably year-round, and I bought my first underwater camera. But as things sometimes tend to go, just as things started to seem normal and predictable again, life served up a horribly unfair twist. One of my best friends from the Young Survival Coalition (the flasher in my aforementioned cheerleader scenario) announced that her doctors had discovered extensive metastatic disease — her cancer, which we’d all thought was long gone, had come back, and there was not going to be a cure. She died shortly thereafter, long before her 40th birthday.
That knocked me for a loop. After that, I decided it was time to go from being an uppercase SURVIVOR to being a lowercase survivor for a while. I needed to take a break from a cancer-centric frame of mind, so I busied myself with non-cancer activities. Diving hard, working hard, improving my photography — my desired focus was on anything but illness, and I stopped participating in large support and fundraising efforts. Even then, I kept getting pulled back in. Remembering how isolated I’d felt after my diagnosis and how much others had helped me, I made time to answer questions from people who were facing treatment, and I remained in loose contact with the rest of my original support circle. And as my diving became more intense, I noticed that I would sometimes experience skin bends-like symptoms adjacent to some of my surgical sites, a situation that resulted in consultations with several specialists and the adoption of very conservative diving profiles.