It's #TellItTuesday here on It's Complicated and Clean!, the day I open a vein....no, not a vein, an artery and let the blood of my meandering existence spurt all over my laptop. There's something about me a lot of folks don't know and it's something I don't often talk about: I am a cancer survivor.
Why would I keep this fact to myself? Doesn't make sense, especially in this day and age when we're all trying as best we can to throw money and attention at an insidious disease that not only robs people of their futures, but of their dignity, their hope, and more often than not, their livelihoods and nesteggs. Thanks, broken US healthcare system!
First of all, I never want to appear to capitalize on my experience. Seems unsavory to me. Also, It's not that my story is too horrible to relive. Not at all and that is the MAIN reason I don't wear my survivorhood on my chest. Compared to most of the cancer battles I've witnessed-- either watching loved ones cling to life after torturous treatment after torturous treatment or at the EDJ as a healthcare professional-- I consider my story insignificant....other than its origin. I have a special kind of survivors guilt. I did not endure enough to claim the title of "survivor".
At the age of seventeen (a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer? Does thyroid cancer even have a ribbon? I'm sure it does, I just don't know what color it is. It's the three-toed sloth of cancers. At least papillary thyroid carcinoma is. Medullary and anaplastic are full on badass cancers, but papillary... C'mon. It reminds me of the word papillon which means butterfly in French. Hmmm....which is also the shape of the thyroid. (note to self, look up etymology of word "papillary"). Anyway, it's very slow growing, usually stays put in the neck, and, due to the unique element one's thyroid needs to function, it's pretty easy to obliterate. I'll get to what I went through to obliterate it in a minute. First, let me jump to the juicy part.
How does an otherwise healthy seventeen year old have a thyroid so sick it doesn't have just cancer, but also a goiter and Hashimoto's Thyroiditis? Well, that story, THAT STORY, I do want to shout from the rooftops because it makes me so angry I can hardly see straight every time I think of it. And it is this flood of emotion that's kept me from writing about it for twenty-four years. This is my attempt to make peace with it.
Way back yonder in the mid to late 20th century (yes, the 20th century), two of the eight wells on Camp LeJeune, North Carolina US Marine Corps base contained dangerous levels of PERC and about seventy other hazardous chemicals. What's PERC you ask? It's chemical name: perchloroethylene or tetrachloroethylene, better known as dry cleaning solvent. Yes, you read that right, DRY CLEANING SOLVENT. Also turns out that strontium-90 made the list of "seventy other chemicals". What's that? RADIOACTIVE WASTE. Now as to who knew what when, the sense is that the base's upper echelon knew of the pollution early on and still decided to keep the wells in use. Thanks, guys!
Smack dab in the middle of the polluted water timeframe (1953-1985), my mother became swollen with child--yep, you guessed it, little baby Cindy. Thank my lucky stars Mom craved soda when pregnant with me. We lived on base for another nine months after I was born, but again, Momma Wiggins breastfed me which I'm sure filtered out quite a bit of the poison. I was never directly dosed with PERC or strontium-90 and for that I am grateful. I honestly believe it's why things weren't worse than they were. It's also why the US government states there is no direct causality between perchloroethylene and thyroid cancer. See, even the US government doesn't think my cancer was cancer-y enough. Hey, but given my choices: mouth/throat cancer, breast cancer, leukemia, endometrial cancer, colon cancer, lymphoma, kidney cancer, or liver cancer, I'll take my three-toed sloth any day.
Don't get me wrong, battling thyroid cancer was no picnic. I went through some crap. I endured a needle aspiration (that's a giant freaking needle in the throat for those of you outside the know), two surgeries, six weeks without replacement hormones and then an iodine 131 oblation which made me as nauseous AF for a week. A year later I had to go off my meds for another six weeks to prep for a scan to be sure I was in remission. Those of you who take thyroid meds to stay alive know being without it for six weeks is no walk in the park. Symptoms include extreme fatigue, constipation, weight gain and minor hair loss.
I have to take replacement thyroid horomones for the rest of my life to the tune of $30 - $40 per month because that's what works for me costs, no inexpensive levothyroxine for me! I also have a gnarly scar at the base of my neck that looks like Mike Meyers slashed my throat but I somehow didn't die. Add to the mix that I was seventeen/eighteen and had to drop out of my first semester of college when all this was going on, it felt as though the world was ending. But that feeling was adolescent hyperbole. I didn't lose all my hair, I didn't vomit for weeks or months on end, I was never hospitalized because I was close to death--not from the cancer, but from the treatment. Nothing ended and life went on.
The same cannot be said for Janey Ensminger, the daughter of USMC master sergeant Jerry Ensminger. She died of cancer at the age of nine. I cannot imagine the pain and outrage her parents went through, but her father turned his profound loss into something positive: It's thanks to Jerry Ensminger, and his advocacy group The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten, the state of the water at Camp LeJeune was finally exposed circa 1999.
I give my eternal thanks to the brave, persistent souls who would not be silenced so that those of us affected by this travesty could receive the most basic of healthcare, at least those with cancers and conditions that can be linked to PERC and strontium-90. The rest of us with health issues who cannot prove causality, well, we are really forgotten about. Forty bucks doesn't sound like a huge nut to come up with every month, but spread over the course of my lifetime, should I live to see an average US female lifespan, it equals roughly $30,000. Ouch! And that number doesn't even include the infertility issues I've gone through. Six pregnancies with one live birth. *SMH* Infertility and miscarriages can be linked to PERC, but they can also be linked to exposure to myriad other chemicals, too. Fact of the matter is we ingest nasty stuff every day. It is the state of the union no one likes to talk about.
Cheers,
Cindy
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