Hello Grace, It's Me

One

Time Stopped

Time stopped on July 31, 2020, at approximately 11:09 in the morning. Or at least that is what it felt like. We all have fears, and that day one of my biggest was confirmed. I had been diagnosed with stage 2B triple negative breast cancer.

It honestly felt like a blur. All I heard was womp, womp, womp, the Charlie Brown language those of us who are seventies and eighties babies grew up on. I was numb, scared, and confused. How could I have breast cancer at thirty-nine, when the median age is sixty-two? Why didn't I feel a lump sooner? What did this mean for my family? Every question swirling through my mind did nothing to soothe the planner in me. This can't be happening. This shouldn't be happening.

When I found the lump, I made a promise to myself that I would share my story, all of it, including the ugly truths. So let me back up to the appointment that started everything.

My appointment on August 6 was for a biopsy, because what the mammogram and ultrasound had shown on July 31 was nothing short of a smoking gun. The radiologist that day, bless his heart, was not polished with his bedside manner, so the news came at me directly. It went something like this. Mrs. Knight, this area here shows a mass with a jagged outline, and over here are your lymph nodes, which are quite a bit thicker and darker, indicating potential cancer. I'm sorry.

So my cancer had escaped. Not only did it have the audacity to invade and grow in my body, it had leeched onto an innocent party. Collateral damage.

I sat there in shock, by myself, because the independent woman in me had chosen to go to that appointment alone. It was no big deal, I had told myself. Probably a cyst. Those are the things we say when we are in denial. I made it through the consult. They handed me a thick, informative book on everything breast cancer, and I went on my way. And then I got to my car.

I cried the whole way home. Mask on, glasses fogged, a snotty mess. It felt like it took five minutes just to catch my breath. I yelled at the Lord, at the trees, at the passing cars, because I was hurt and I wanted everything to hurt with me. My house is fifteen minutes from the hospital. That day it took thirty. It felt like the people walking by on the sidewalk were moving faster than I was driving.

The whole way I replayed everything I had heard, wondering how I would face my family. Because that is what we do as women. We can be on fire and still worry about catching everyone around us on fire too, instead of putting out our own flames. The first person I called was my husband. The last person I went to see was my mom. In between, I called my best friend. All of it was hard. There were so many tears that day, from all of us, a reminder that none of us are promised tomorrow.

For days afterward it felt like an out of body experience. Every morning I woke up and prayed it had been a terrible nightmare. But there was no counting backward to wake myself up. The nightmare was my new reality. I had gone from a woman who knew who she was, what she wanted, and where she was going, to a woman just trying to survive.

Two

The Choice

I stayed lost for a few days. I was overwhelmed, consumed by the fear I felt in that parking lot, and it was manifesting itself into real life. And then I made a choice. This was my life, and no one would ever advocate for it better than me.

From that point I researched everything. I joined support groups built for breast cancer, and specifically for African American and younger women. That part mattered to me deeply. There is data behind the disparities in prognosis between non-Hispanic white women and African American women, and I wanted to understand exactly what I was up against. With all of that information at my fingertips, I became a sponge.

I did the typical me thing and turned a crappy situation into one about growth, acceptance, and learning. Do not get me wrong. There were nights I did not catch a wink, because my mind raced about all the unknowns. But I had decided I would not be a passenger in my own treatment.

A few weeks in, I had a catheter chest port placed, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. When you finally come to grips with the magnitude of an illness like this, it can be numbing. I think the numbness was self induced, because I could not, or would not, feel all of the fear at once. I sometimes wondered, why me? But in the same breath I could ask, why not me? Cancer has no agenda.

If this taught me nothing else, it taught me that taking care of myself is just as important as taking care of everyone else. Do not ignore the signs your body sends you, the subtle ones and the loud ones. Be your own biggest advocate.

Three

The Red Devil

Infusion day. I woke up troubled that first morning, but when I read all of the words of encouragement that had come in overnight, my spirit lifted. During all that darkness in the world, those people were my light.

My first regimen was four rounds of AC. The breast cancer community likes to call Adriamycin the Red Devil, but I refused that name. I called it my Red Rejuvenator. It is unfortunate to have poison going into your body, but it was the only thing that would get me to NED, no evidence of disease, so I made my peace with it. I did not have time for that kind of negativity. The medicine and I had work to do.

The first weekend after chemo humbled me. I had tried my hardest to anticipate what the aftershock would feel like, and I completely downplayed it. Nausea, mood swings, the works. But I made it. Foggy brain and all, I was still here, still a boss.

With each infusion it got harder, exactly the way the doctors and the other thrivers had warned me it would. By the third round my nausea and aches were manageable, but my emotions were sky high. The simplest thing could make me cry. Early on, I beat myself up for that. Eventually, I learned to give myself some grace.

I cried before my second treatment, because I was sad that I had to go back. But not going back was never an option I was willing to entertain. I would do whatever it took to rid my body of this disease.

Chemo has a way of rearranging you in small ways too. It wrecked my circadian rhythm, so I was often up before dawn, typing out my thoughts to whoever was awake to read them. Those early mornings, foggy and quiet, became some of the most honest writing I have ever done. A lot of this book was born at hours when most people were still asleep.

I finished the four rounds of AC right before Thanksgiving. I like to think of AC as the atom bomb dropped from a plane, and the Taxol that came next as the ground troops, shooting everything on sight. Different weapon, same war.

There were small mercies. Every infusion Friday, I let myself have Keebler sandwich crackers and apple juice. That was the one thing I looked forward to all week. It's the little things.

By the eighth treatment of twelve, I will be honest, some days it was hard to get out of bed. And that was OK. In the beginning, I would punish myself for not doing this or that the way I used to. Slowly I stopped. The bed could have me on the days it needed me. I would get up tomorrow.

Four

The Mirror

I had fully expected to lose my hair. I bought four or five wigs before chemo even started, braced for it. What I did not expect was my eyebrows.

The day I lost them was more of a shock than losing my hair. I barely had eyebrows to begin with, but losing the few strands I had was traumatizing in a way I could not explain to anyone who had not lived it. So there I was, learning to draw them back on every single morning, and refusing to even touch the wigs I had been so practical about buying. Priorities.

Here is what no one prepares you for. When your body is already changing in ways you did not choose, the mirror stops being a mirror. It becomes a scoreboard of everything the illness is taking. It was never about vanity. I just wanted to still recognize the woman looking back at me.

Some days I found her anyway. I posted a selfie with my bald head and called it repping Eggo, because if I had to lose the hair, I was at least going to clown about it. My husband swore I looked better bald than he did. I held on to the little things. The new look. The laugh. The morning ritual of drawing my own face back on. That ritual was not vanity either. It was me telling myself, every single morning, that I was still here.

Five

The Hard Truths

There is a part of this I have to tell you about, even though it is hard.

That fall, I was reading a cancer journal for young people who had been diagnosed, and one article stayed with me. The author was a veteran and a mother who had been diagnosed with stage 2 triple negative at forty, and then stage 4 only two short years later. I was immersed in her story. I could relate to so much of it. When I finished, I went looking for her online, this independent author, this clearly remarkable person, and I learned that she had recently passed from the same disease that was now in my body.

I was broken. How could someone so young and so full of life, who had fought so hard, lose to this? It took me days to mourn a woman I had never met, and to climb back out of a dark place. The reality of how serious this is can come at you like waves against a paddle board.

It happened again in December. A fellow breastie, a mother of three young children, no older than thirty-five, had been diagnosed at stage 2 like me, done everything right, and a year later learned that her cancer had come back metastatic. Stage 4. Told to plan for the worst.

When I let myself sit with the numbers for my type of cancer, the survival and recurrence rates that were so much lower than other kinds, it could be crushing. I tried very hard not to live in that space. Why? Because I reminded myself, over and over, that I had survived one hundred percent of my worst days, and this would be no different. I owed myself the opportunity to live. So I would fight this with everything in me.

After I mourned that first author, I went home and dusted off my own bucket list. I refocused on what was actually important. We are all here on borrowed time, and I did not want to spend mine full of regret. That is the strange gift these losses left me. They made me serious about living.

On the days the fear won anyway, I leaned on Andra Day's song Rise Up, and let its promise, that I would rise again and again in spite of the ache, become my own.

Six

You Can't Do This Alone

One morning, one of my breasties posted something that made my heart drop. I'm tired. Thinking about giving up. I went straight into fix it mode, because that is what I do as a mother, a daughter, a friend, a woman.

When I dug into it, the problem was not the illness itself. It was that she was going through the single hardest thing in her life with no support system. Let me say that again. No one.

It made me look at my own life and realize I had been downplaying what I had. The amount of love I was being shown overwhelmed me. From my dentist to my neighbors and everyone in between, I had people. They made sure my family always had a meal, something to read, something to wrap up in. My heart was full.

I learned to say the thank yous out loud. My best friend, who sat with me through treatment. My work family, who showered me with love. My mother, who took my littles for the weekend so I could rest. My husband, who tried his hardest not to show worry, even though the hurt in his eyes always said it all.

At one point, my husband Jason wrote to everyone himself. I will let his words stand exactly as he wrote them.

I take a step back and look at my beautiful wife pushing through this, and I think to myself there is no way in hell I could be as strong as her. She has her good days and her bad days, but she has not lost that beautiful smile. Not to mention she looks better bald than I do. I am truly blessed to have her as my wife.

I used to believe that needing people was a weakness. This taught me the opposite. You cannot do this alone, and you were never meant to.

Seven

Gift or Curse

One week, deep in it, a question landed on me and would not leave. Was cancer a gift or a curse?

For me, the answer was about perspective. This thing changed my life in so many ways, both terrible and, strangely, good. When was the last time you really looked up at the sky on a walk? I did that week, and it stopped me in my tracks. It reminded me to appreciate the smaller, more mundane things. If nothing else, I appreciated being alive more that day than I had the day before.

Never take life for granted. One day you may look up and realize you lost a diamond while you were busy collecting stones.

There is a strange mercy in treatment too. It takes you to what feels like inches from death, and in the same breath it rebuilds you. I felt both at once, the breaking down and the building up, and I could not always tell which was happening on a given day. Often it was both.

There was another reframe that got me through. The other women in my support group would say their breasts had tried to kill them. I came to see mine differently. My breast saved me. Without that lump, this cancer could have grown and spread much further before anyone knew it was there. Under any other circumstance, I would not have slowed down enough to notice that I was a little more tired than usual, or that I had aches in places that had never ached before. That lump made me pause and listen to my body, and listening is what saved my life.

I am not going to pretend any of this was glamorous. There is nothing glamorous about a chronic illness, and I never wanted to frame it that way. But I will tell you that it cracked me open to a kind of gratitude I did not have before. The crackers and the apple juice. The sky. The text that came at exactly the right minute. Diamonds, all of them, that I had been walking past for years.

Eight

Looking for the Old Me

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I started to notice that I was grieving someone who was still alive. Me.

By the third treatment, my emotions were so high that the simplest thing could make me cry. I am not, and will never be, the same woman I was before this diagnosis, and I had to learn that this was OK. One early morning, foggy and inspired, a thought came to me fully formed. If I ever sit still long enough, I am going to write a book, and it will be called Hello Grace, my name is Charmica.

I did not know yet how much I would need that sentence.

Because for months, I kept looking for the old Charmica. The one who knew exactly who she was, what she wanted, and where she was going. And every time I came up short, I felt all of it. The failure. The frustration. The grief. I had written, more than once, about giving ourselves grace, and I can tell you it is so much easier said than done.

I heard other survivors say they came out the other side of this changed, different people. Early on, I took that as a challenge. I was hell bent on being the same me I had always been. Eventually I understood that it simply was not possible. Cancer changes who we are down to the very core.

I loved my former self so much. She had always been there for me. Together, we had survived the worst days of my life. But slowly I began to embrace my new self, because she was tougher and more resilient than I ever could have imagined. The rollercoaster I was on turned out to be one of growth, acceptance, and forgiveness, and I decided I was here for it.

So I stopped looking for the woman I used to be. I turned around, and I introduced myself to the one I was becoming.

Nine

The Bell I Didn't Ring

On February 26, I completed my last chemo infusion. Number sixteen of sixteen. There were days along the way when I was not sure I could continue, and through prayer and support, I had made it.

I thought I knew how that day would feel. I had pictured myself dancing out of the building, ringing the bell they keep for moments like this. Instead, I sauntered out slightly confused, and a little scared.

The confusion was because I expected to be happier about closing that chapter. The fear was quieter, and harder to admit. Chemo was no longer fighting my cancer. The thing that had been attacking the disease for five months was finished, and now it was just me, and my body, and the waiting.

I had a phenomenal response to treatment. After five months, the chemo did what it was supposed to do, and then a little more. And still I walked out unsteady. When I finally talked it through with a counselor and my breastie support group, they told me what I was feeling was normal. My counselor called it a kind of PTSD, a fear of recurrence that made it difficult to celebrate the wins. I let that marinate, and it made perfect sense. The clear scans, the shrinking tumors, everything I had prayed for had come true, and I still could not exhale. I needed to say it out loud before I could be grateful for it.

On April 15, I went in for surgery, a lumpectomy. The best possible outcome would be dead cancer cells and clear margins. I asked everyone I knew to pray.

Eight days later, my surgeon told me I had a pathological complete response to treatment, in both the breast and the axilla. The best outcome there is. Because of the type of cancer I had, I had been given a thirty percent chance of a complete response. I beat those odds. And finally, finally, I could breathe.

Ten

Hello, Grace

After surgery, there was still more road. I started daily radiation, which my oncologists called the insurance policy on everything that had come before. My first thought was that they could keep their insurance. Then I remembered, why give up now, this close. So I wiped my tears and kept pushing. Four more weeks. And in the middle of it, the smallest, biggest thing happened. My hair started to grow back. Here's to the little things.

A year out from my diagnosis, I reached what the medical community calls survivorship. I will be honest with you. I did not know exactly how to feel about that word. A full year later, I still had not processed the magnitude of what I had been through. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I had quietly been upgraded from stage 2B to stage 3A. I am almost glad I missed that detail when it happened, because I would have worried myself sick over the prognosis. But I fought it as hard as I could, and I am still here to talk about it.

Survivorship, I learned, is not a finish line. It is a new beginning, and it comes with its own work. Healing became necessary. Therapy became, without a doubt, mandatory. And once I had steadier ground under my feet, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to pay it forward. I signed up to become a breast cancer peer supporter, and I opened up my journals to my community, my sisters and my brothers, the people who had ridden every loop of this rollercoaster with me.

It is so important to share our struggles and our journeys in a raw and real way, because that is how we help and educate the next woman. Here's to a lifetime of clear mammograms. And here's to grace.

So this is me, on the other side, finally still long enough to write the book I promised myself with foggy chemo brain at the kitchen table.