My grandmother: a woman I never had the chance to meet

By: Christina Kostic
Posted In: Opinion

During the month of October, also known as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we often hear statistics on breast cancer. We also hear inspirational stories of survival and unfortunately, sad accounts of battles against breast cancer that have been lost. I wanted to take this opportunity to share my story, how breast cancer has affected my own family. I think it is important we all realize that breast cancer is closer than we think. Chances are you have at least one person in your life who has been touched by the terrible disease, or you may even be diagnosed with it someday.

My grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 49 years old back in 1975, and my mom was just barely out of high school. Back in those days, a diagnosis of breast cancer was close to a death sentence. Research was nowhere near where it is today, and medical technologies weren’t as sophisticated as they are now.

One mastectomy was performed. She also went through chemotherapy and radiation, and my grandma was thought to be in pretty good shape at that point in time. However, doctors soon found cancer in her other breast, and another mastectomy had to be done. For those of you who aren’t sure what that is, a mastectomy is the removal of the entire breast and affected lymph nodes, stretching all the way under the arm as a way to remove breast cancer from the body. I can only imagine how traumatizing that would be for a woman.

After both mastectomies and more chemotherapy and radiation, and an x-ray that came out clear, the doctors thought that my grandma was in remission. As it turns out, it was too late. Unknown to her doctors, the breast cancer in my grandma had spread to behind the breast bone, and since they had only x-rayed her from the front, they didn’t catch it. If she had been x-rayed from the back, the doctors would have seen the cancer.

However, this wouldn’t have done much good. Although her life would have been prolonged a little, the cancer eventually would have killed her. At this point it had already spread to her lungs. My grandma died in 1981 when she was just 55 years old, and my mom was 24. I was born five years later.

Now all of a sudden, I’m 22 years old and my mom is 52. I put myself in her shoes the other day and tried to imagine how I would react if I lost her to breast cancer. I started to cry because I can’t even imagine what I would do. Thankfully though, much medical advancement has been made since my grandma died.

The reality is that, with women who have a history of breast cancer in their family, they need to be extra vigilant. My mom is very diligent about getting mammograms, and I will be too. Just recently, the doctors were unsure about something they found in my mom’s breast after doing a mammogram. Just to be safe, they performed an ultrasound. Again, the results were inconclusive. My mom then had a needle biopsy; wanting to take further preventative measures, the doctors then performed a lumpectomy, a surgical excision of a tumor from the breast tissue. Thankfully, the tumor was found to be benign, but it still served as a wake-up call to my family.

From time to time I think of the grandma I never got to meet. Am I like her at all? I know she majored in English when she went to college, so we already have one thing in common. After talking to my mom about my grandma’s death, my mom is convinced that had she been alive today and diagnosed with the same thing, more could have been done to save her.

Although breast cancer awareness month is coming to an end, your awareness should not. This year the National Cancer Institute predicts that there will be 182,460 new cases of breast cancer in 2008 among women here in America, and 40,480 of those women will die. With these staggering numbers it’s important that we keep this crisis in our minds not just in the month of October, but all year long.

With many wonderful organizations out there dedicated to breast cancer research, and generous individuals who donate money to the cause, with each passing day we are one step closer to finding the cure, and one step closer to saving our mothers, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, daughters and ourselves from the terrible disease.