Survivor of the Week: Mary Ann Mintier

Editor's note: Leading up to the 2008 Pender County Relay for Life event, which will be held at Topsail High School's track on May 2 and 3, Relay for Life presents a series entitled "Survivor of the Week," first-hand survivor stories from brave men and women who have battled cancer. This is the third in a series of four. For more information on the Relay for Life, visit them on-line at www.pendercountyrfl.com.

  
In 1999 my daughter was getting married and we were all very busy with showers, dress hunting and so on. I had my mammogram and remember complaining about the long wait in ugly robes, the discomfort as ones breast is smashed into a pancake and how rough the technician had been with my poor breast. Thank God for all of the above because it resulted in a very early detection of what was at first thought to be "calcification" and later turned out to be breast cancer.
The doctor at the breast clinic told me not to worry, calcifications are very common  in aging breast tissue. No rush for the biopsy. Enjoy your daughter's wedding (still two months away) and have the biopsy after the wedding, he explained. I did, still not thinking about breast cancer since it didn't run in my family and I was only 53. So after the wedding when the biopsy came back positive for cancer, I was stunned. 
At that time I was living in northern New Jersey, close to New York City. So I immediately got an appointment at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City feeling that since I had to live in that area I should take advantage of the best cancer care in the Northeast. I never second-guessed that decision, as the doctors and staff there were incredibly supportive and very informative. My tumor was no bigger than a pen dot on a piece of paper, smaller than a centimeter, but the tissue around it was pre-cancerous, the margins not clean. Within days of my first visit to Sloan Kettering a second surgery, lumpectomy, was performed to try to get clean margins and the sentinel lymph node was removed for examination. Apparently cancer travels from the first node, the sentinel node, in sequence; if node one is okay so are all the others. The search for clean margins was unsuccessful and the sentinel node, which has thousands of cells, had one crummy cancer cell. The doctor told me that was the lowest positive they had on record, as a cancer research center they had lots of data but being an interesting new piece of data wasn't consoling.

My options were to take more tissue in the search for clean margins or consider a mastectomy and reconstruction. So my husband and I headed to the reconstruction surgeon for a consult. Now with all the medical facts in hand we walked up Fifth Avenue on a beautiful autumn afternoon and went to lunch. This was to become our modus operendi - face the challenge with a lovely meal in New York City. If that seems odd, think again. Faced with a life threatening condition what better reaction than to enjoy life. And so we did.
I wasn't sure what to do but my husband was a big help here, assuring me he'd rather grow old with me with one breast than to lose me. That made sense to me since dying wasn't high on my list of priorities either. Still another surgery removed the rest of my breast tissue and inserted a tissue expander in preparation for still another surgery, which reconstructed my breast.
Then came chemo. This was the only thing I feared other than the recurrence of my cancer. I hate to throw up and I was so afraid chemo would make me ill while making me better. Such contradictions! I'm glad to say that today's drugs help so much with nausea and other side effects that I was never sick. As a matter of fact, after having my intravenous chemo every third Friday for many months, my husband and I would actually go out to dinner and celebrate being one step closer to being cured. I did get tired easily during chemo but you learn to listen to your body.  When you get tired, rest. When you feel good, enjoy everything around you.
I'm very happy to say that so far my cancer has not recurred. Cancer taught me to enjoy the now and to appreciate every day. I'm blessed and grateful to be here.

— Mary Ann Mintier