Sam and the Big C by Brenda Wong

“It’s only a scary word if you make it so.”

here’s a decent amount of hyperbole when it comes to cancer. Usually it’s this giant thing that strikes you down like lightning and takes over your entire life. Well, while that isn’t exactly far from the truth, my experience was certainly a lot quieter than one would expect. In fact, it started with the symptoms of what I thought could be the common cold. A slight swollen node in my right breast probably wasn’t enough to warrant worry. However, when it lingered for more than two days, I took that as my cue to pick myself up and head to the hospital.

hen faced with the possibility of having to introduce the big ‘C’ word into your life, you’re going to experience a bucket-load of denial. ‘It couldn’t be’ is something you tell yourself over and over, and let me tell you — waiting for the confirmation or denial of that hope is excruciating. I’m a practical person by nature, so I refused to stay in that period of uncertainty for too long. I went from a general practitioner’s appointment to an appointment with a breast consultant surgeon to an ultrasound to a biopsy all in the space of a day. Human beings are worse liars than they believe themselves to be. I think a part of me knew the truth when I saw the expression on breast consultant surgeon Dr. Yip’s face right before my ultrasound and biopsy (handled rather expertly by Dr. Evelyn Ho). As much as one wants to ignore that little voice in your head telling you something isn’t right, in that moment, I found it best to listen. As it turned out, the little voice was right. The text message I received from Dr. Yip’s office on that fateful Friday morning sealed my fate— the lump was malignant. Seeing those little white words enclosed in the little grey bubble as if it was any other banal text felt surreal. I realised the road ahead wasn’t going to be easy. This wouldn’t only affect me, but my loved ones too. As much as cancer is a personal experience, it is, after all for me, by no means an isolated one.

The happy Wongs a few months before diagnosis

Despite the obvious implications of that text message, I simply put my ‘Miss Practical’ hat on. My experience, or I suppose my illness, soon became a structured, organized checklist.

The first step was getting the damn tumour out.

When the doctors first found the lump, it was barely two centimetres long, and frankly the idea that something so small could cause such trouble was too bizarre to comprehend. I arranged a removal on the earliest possible operation date Dr. Yip could provide. I couldn’t let the Big C get in the way of my life. Hell, I’d been planning on visiting my daughters in England for months. The catch? I would be on a 13-hour direct flight only eleven days post-surgery. You would think travel plans would have been quickly re-prioritised, but I just felt like I wanted to get my life as close to normal as I could muster. I was also encouraged to not change my travel plans by my Surgery was conducted a mere 5 ever-supportive husband, who thought it would be beneficial days after I received the biopsy refor me to see our children regardless. Of course it would have sults. been a perfect trip had he been able to accompany me, but being the breadwinner is a tough job and someone’s gotta do it. When the day of surgery came around, it had grown another centimetre, which I thought was a sign of aggressive growth. That should have scared me a lot more than I let it at the time, but there was nothing to do but toughen the hell up and get it over with.

am pleased to say the surgery went well, but there were some obstacles ahead. When they removed the lump, they took out 15 lymph nodes around my underarm area too. This made traveling even more complicated, as the position of the surgical incisions — the cuts on the top of my right breast and under my right arm — affected my mobility, and I was advised not to lift anything above two kilograms. Thankfully, my daughters responded to their new roles as my personal bellboys with no complaints. Since I needed to wait three to six weeks after my surgery before I started chemotherapy, I went ahead and hopped on a plane to London and later, Paris. Spending that time with my daughters made me feel almost close to normal, and apart from a few moments where I felt slight fatigue, it was an experience I would not have given up for the world. If I could take one thing away from my trip, it’s that the pain or the worry you feel is not what you end up remembering. Rather, it is the sheer joy, and the warmth of being with your loved ones that sticks in your memory. Remember, it’s just as important to laugh and continue to enjoy life as much as it is to take care of yourself.

Being in such a crowded, bustling city did make me worry about my weakened immune system, so my daughters and I thought it best to avoid the extremely tightly-packed tube. I also had a few supplements on hand to help with energy levels that dipped throughout the day. Paris turned out to be an even easier time; despite going on two walking tours in a day, I actually felt quite alright, and whenever I did feel tired, my eldest daughter found a way to 3

hail cheap taxis to ferry us back to our hotel. And while you would think food might have been a problem, it actually worked out as I found that soups worked in my favour for that particular trip. So even though I was ill, the trip across the world was in fact, pretty therapeutic — and it’s proof that with a bit of planning, travel is still a possibility.

Paris is always a good idea. It’s a pity my husband Kenny couldn’t come along for the trip, but he hugged me extra tight at the airport before I passed through passport control.

ancer is not something you can ever really predict, but it came as even more of a surprise considering how I was living at the time. I’ve always been a fan of some good food and a lie-down in front of the telly, but right before all of this happened I was very intent on making a change, to really try and get my body to the best possible state it could be in. Cutting down on fried foods and meat, going for regular walks and trying to watch my weight were things I had slowly been trying to incorporate into my daily routine. It seemed like the perfect time to do so — my daughters were both away at university, my husband and I had moved into a gated community with a nice park to walk around in, and Malaysia happens to have some excellent organic and vegetarian cuisine. In all honesty, I hadn’t been taking good care of myself up to that point. I was pretty fit when I was younger — I had even represented my state in a running event once, and my high school friends enjoyed teasing me about my ‘buns of steel’. 4

It felt about time to pick those habits back up, to really try to get my body to the best possible state I could. It was a cruel twist of irony, then, that I was diagnosed with cancer at what was probably the healthiest and most stress-free point of my adult life. I had resigned from my challenging teaching job, and was ready for some well-deserved rest. In fact, I went for a routine mammogram three months before my diagnosis, and there was absolutely nothing unusual detected. I was in perfect health. A lot can change in a few months.

Celebrating Chinese New Year a month before the Big C arrived.

Succumbing to emotion could have been easy. I could have been angry that my long battle with weight loss was set back even further. I could have wallowed in the grim notion that the same disease that had taken my mother away from me years ago had come knocking at my door too. But for the most part, I was surprised to find how little negativity I let into my life. The only exception to this came after I attended a talk on the possible causes of cancer. You see, one of the things you immediately do when you are diagnosed with cancer is do a ton of research. It’s a coping mechanism I guess — after all, you only fear what you don’t understand. But when I attended the above-mentioned talk I was immediately awash with guilt. I had read and heard so many things about living a healthy lifestyle and staying away from certain foods, but this talk kept hammering home the idea that the diet I ate, and the diet that I’d provided for my family, could have been the primary cause of my cancer. My stomach dropped. Had I been sabotaging my family’s health unknowingly all these years? But after thinking it over, the feeling quickly dissipated. Whether or not those foods were carcinogenic wasn’t my fault, and plenty of other people around the world were eating them regularly. When it came down to it, I couldn’t let that kind of negative thinking get me down. I had enough to deal with, after all. 5

oing with your gut turned out to be important when it came to deciding what kind of treatment to pursue. The obvious solution was chemotherapy, but it took a while for me to decide on a course of action. Yet again, when it came to researching possible alternatives I felt the familiar rumblings of fear and anxiety in my heart. In the end, I decided to follow the advice of my doctors, and my doctors alone. You’ll find that if you’re diagnosed with the Big C, everyone you know will have some kind of advice of their own. But I figured that only the professionals could be trusted to know the best course of action. Chemotherapy ended up being the route I chose to take, and so I was to go through six chemotherapy sessions and twenty radiotherapy sessions after. Chemotherapy sounds like a really scary process and is often portrayed as extremely dramatic. Although it is something I wouldn’t want to go through again nor wish on anybody, it wasn’t totally unmanageable. A session can last from three to four hours. Before each actual session, you have to take a blood test to check for your platelet and white blood cell count as well as your haemoglobin levels. If everything is sufficient, then they start you on the preventative drugs. Those drugs are for the many varying side effects of chemotherapy, and they try to cover all the bases by using an IV drip to give you anti-gastric, anti-nausea, anti-allergy and steroid medicine.

To be honest, setting up the IV hurt a bit because of the needle, but in my case it hurt a little more because my veins are quite small. They tried not to use the same vein every session in order to prevent more damage, but it was quite difficult not to. It was quite a strange feeling having the IV in, and I could feel my whole arm getting cold when they started the drips, which in a way was a good sign that the drugs were entering my system without any obstacles. After dripping in all the preventative medication, it was time for the actual chemotherapy drug. For me, they used two sets of drugs over the course of my medication. One set was used in the first three sessions, comprising three different drugs — one of which was bright red, which also made my urine turn bright red as well much to my shock, and later, amusement! They set those to drip quite fast, whereas the other set of drugs used in the last three sessions had only one drug that was set to drip slower in order to avoid causing chest constrictions. After the first three sessions, parts of my veins actually turned quite dark — as if they were burned from inside, but I was lucky not get as much pigmentation as I could have. I also opted

to go for booster injections to strengthen my immune system, which had to take place two to three days after each chemotherapy session.

he most obvious effect of chemotherapy is the hair loss, but to be honest that was the least annoying effect of the medication. I had kept my hair very long for over twenty years, but I was surprised to find that I was not as upset as I had thought I would be. In order to ease the process, I made sure to take it in steps. Before starting my chemotherapy sessions, I went from having long hair to a pixie cut, which then lead up to shaving it off entirely when my hair started to fall. The process of my hair loss really drove home the reality of my journey, and while it was a little bit scary, to be honest I was a lot more concerned about the other effects of chemotherapy. I found out over the six sessions that the effects actually varied from session to session: hot flushes after my first session, a couple of tiny mouth ulcers after my third, and an incredibly sore mouth during my last three sessions, as if it had been scalded. There were some relatively consistent problems too though, the main one being how the chemo completely altered my sense of taste. The memories of how food tasted didn’t match what my taste buds actually processed, which was truly annoying as my family and I are foodies by nature. I also felt some nausea, stomach pains, and bloating, and I found that my energy depleted quite quickly — what my oncologist Dr. Mellor referred to as “driving without a spare tank of gas”! I was however quite lucky as I avoided having a lot of ulcers, and while I did experience achy bones, that could have been due to the booster injections I was taking. The moment I was diagnosed with cancer, I knew I wanted to have a record of my experience. And this is why I started to write this story! I thought it might also help my healing process as well as serve as a memento of this journey, and I wanted something that I could share if any-

one else wanted to know what my experience was like. Overall, I think I managed to keep my head up through the whole ordeal. I tried to prevent morbid thoughts despite the diagnosis, and I just focused my energy on finishing one task at a time — first diagnosis, then surgery, then medication — and prepared myself to simply embrace all the side effects.

In order to celebrate the completion of my chemotherapy treatment, my family and I decided to have a little fun and take some professional photos. I think these photos (that can be seen at the end of this article) really illustrate that I have come out of this a stronger person as well as how blessed I feel with the support I received from my family.

hile I don’t know what the future holds for me, I’m going to just approach it the way I’ve been trucking through this, and I’ve learned to look more on the positive side of life. What I am thankful for is the fact that I know I have good people in my life; my siblings and close relatives who put aside their own family matters to support me in every sense of the word, especially my sister who flew back from Sydney where she now lives just to take care of me for almost two months; old friends whom I had only just reconnected with recently, who rallied to my side, going out of their way cooking and bringing over healthy food to aid my recovery; friends of my husband who showed their spiritual side, helping with prayers, etc. All these give me reason to have hope, and to have faith that life is beautiful. This is a wake-up call for me to live it up, embrace it and push on with zest, enthusiasm and above all, optimism.

… My husband, Kenny, for his patience and support throughout this journey. My daughters, Brenda and Christine, who helped me write and edit this article. My sister, Cindy, who flew all the way from Australia to take care of me for almost two months, and her family, especially my nephew Dennis who patiently answered my medical queries. My brother, Kee Siong, and his wife, Paik Yiem, for supporting my spiritual healing through prayer. My cousins, Yvonne and Gerald, and my father, Sia Tong Beow, for their continuous moral support and general assistance. Marissa and Ivy, for their generosity and kindness in cooking healthy meals for me.

Adam, for taking all of the beautiful photographs featured. Pat, for handling all my insurance matters and providing moral support as well (along with Pek Lai, Mee Har and Wee Keong). Jeck and Sam, for their moral and spiritual support. My surgeon, Professor Yip, nurse Yeo, my oncologist Dr. Mellor and the chemotherapy day care staff in Subang Jaya Medical Centre as well as the radiotherapy technicians for their excellent professional care. Dr. Wendy and Cynthia for their empathy and moral support. Vincent, for his kind and gentle treatment of my hair. Hong Gimm, Chung Kim, Julie Goodway, Carlyn, and Catherine Mower for their kindness and endless gifts—both physical and moral. And most of all, thank you for taking the time to read my journey with the Big C. If you have any comments or queries, I’d love to hear from you at samandthebigc@gmail.com