Olivia-Newton John's breast cancer returns after 25 years
Comments
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Beesie, you seem to have a healthy handle on cancer and the possibilities that it comes back.
I've only ever known one person with cancer growing up, none in my family and though I was not, nor am I, naive to think cancer won't touch me (or anyone else) it is still not something I want to believe is a given for healthy adults, aging or otherwise. Now that I had the misfortune of being granted the cancer kiss (sarcasm), I know my odds are higher for other/met type diagnosis. And since the odds of my getting cancer were low, I hope aging adults who read your post don't go in thinking it will happen to them. I know many, many, many older (90s) people who died of old age and never got cancer.
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Thank you, wallycat. It was hard to lose her at such a young age. She lived with severe LE for many, many years without complaint. I guess I live with hoping I won't recur or get a new cancer but knowing it is possible just keeps me aware of my health and body a bit more.
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Very interest thread. I've thought about my own mortality a lot in the past five years. Is that healthy? Hmm maybe, maybe not. I do find it ironic that my 90 yr old father in law has never been sick a day in his life, and never took any meds at all, ever, until Alzheimer's showed up. I'll take breast cancer over that, thank you.
Best wishes to Ms. Newton John. We saw her last year (?) at the local casino. She is quite amazing.
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wallycat, my attitude is "Prepare for the worst, and hope for the best". So I am mentally prepared for another cancer diagnosis during my lifetime (and am not surprised when I see it happen to anyone else) but I am hopeful that it won't happen.
The current stats suggest that approx. 40% of all adults will develop cancer at least one time. Because the likelihood of developing cancer gets higher as we age (and our bodies start to naturally fail) and because people are living longer (thanks to the elimination of some diseases and better survival rates for many diseases, including most cancers), I suspect that this number may go up as baby boomers continue to age.
I don't want to get cancer again, but I also don't want to have a heart attack, PE or stroke, or develop Alzheimer's, or have a nasty fall (which can cause permanent physical or mental damage), etc., etc.. To be honest, I think I'd be more scared if I'd survived a heart attack, PE or stroke, because another could come at any time without warning and it could be immediately fatal. I don't want to get cancer again, but at least with cancer you have some choices and have some time. Cancer is scary, and all of us here have been diagnosed so we all live with the reality of this fear and the awareness of what a cancer diagnosis entails and what it could mean. That's frightening, but I think some of the devils we don't know might actually be scarier.
farmerlucy, I don't know whether thinking about your mortality after having had a cancer diagnosis is healthy or not, but I think it's pretty normal. I certainly do it (my paragraph above and my previous post being examples of things I've thought about a lot). Since none of us will get out of life alive, I prefer to believe that I'm more developed and evolved as a human since I now have this awareness. Either that or I'm crazy.
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Agreed. No one gets to pick how we die. I'm thinking getting Alzheimer's at 90 isn't a bad way to go into that deep, dark night, especially having lived unscathed till then.
Personally, thinking about mortality is healthy and normal...
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I hear you. I am 5 and 4 years out. This news always scares me and I also compare everything to see if it the same as mine. I hate it when people make comments that I am "done" with treatment. I will never be done and I will ALWAYS have the risk of recurrence to deal with! I have been though hell and trying to get out of it isn't easy and it does change you. No one understands what that is like unless they have gone through this. I take Fareston which has awful side effects but better than tamoxifen. Diagnosed with ER PR +, HER2 _-, stage 1, grade 2 IDC. Left mastectomy 5/17/12 with TE recon. 5/31/12 MAJOR life threatening infection - hospital for 7 days on IV vancomycin, Cipro and zyvox. 6/5/12 surgery to remove TE to save life. 6/12/17 ER for rectal bleeding (from lots of strong AB's), 7/12 colonoscopy to rule out colon cancer (negative!), 9/14/12 surgery to put TE back. 10/1/12 tamoxifen. 11/20/12 ER serious life threatening hemorrhage from tamoxifen. Emergency D&C to control bleeding - hospital for 3 days over Thanksgiving! Serious anemia from blood loss, refused transfusion. 12/14/12 surgery for final reconstruction. January 2013 - tests to determine cause of hemorrhage including uterine biopsy (negative). refused to go back on tamoxifen. 2/14/13 hemorrhaged again - back to ER, another emergency D&C, in hospital again for 3 days. More tests revealed it was from the tamoxifen. Only solution was a hysterectomy to prevent again as I could not survive another episode. 3/14/13 - hysterectomy. 5/1/13 - diagnosed with 2nd primary cancer on right side! There is a less than .05% chance of developing a 2nd primary cancer in one year. 5/30/13 - right mastectomy. 11/17/13 - final recon. surgery. 6/13 - back on tamoxifen. Felt horrible - physically and mentally. New oncologist switched me to fareston in Nov. 2013 - not great but much better than tamox. 1/14/15 - surgery to fix implant problems. Currently I have developed capsular contracture on left side and having PT twice a week. Have pain and limited range of motion but do not want another surgery. Sorry for such a long response
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I echo so many of the above posts. I live with the fear of a recurrence or other. I accept that I have to live with it, yet I don't always like it. My attitude is to try to be fierce about making those "woods" (not ever out of the woods, haha) as habitable as possible. I'm rather like Beesie--I am probably not completely prepared for a recurrence, but with 6/11 + nodes and a type of c that has a tendency to recur later rather than earlier (10-20 years, some reports claim) I have to find a way to live with the fear but not live IN fear, if you get my drift.
I don't always do that, though. My late husband died of cancer in 1996 when I was 37 and he was 49; we were only married for a few months, I was his primary caregiver, no one in my family had ever died at home before or used Hospice so I was the family guinea pig, I guess. I know what a cancer death looks like. I helped my ex-husband and his wife when he was dx with pancreatic cancer early last year and died last May.
Living with the fear means to me that I take heart in knowing that plenty of women on these boards are living for years with metastatic cancer and living pretty well with it. Living with the fear means that I take heart in believing that there are new txs being developed every day to help us turn this disease from one of death to one that we live with, a treatable disease, so that we can live an average life span and die in our sleep.
Well, I must be feeling pretty good in my little patch of woods today to write the above. Check in with me at the end of August, when I have my regular MO check up, and I'll probably be a trembling PTSD mess, seeing threats behind every single tree. (wry grin)
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Here's an interview with Olivia Newton John in 1993:
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/video/nov-1993...
Olivia Newton-John said she had a modified radical mastectomy and chemo. If she had radiation, it wasn't mentioned. There is an article that states that she was initially diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. Her father had liver cancer and her sister, Rona, passed away from brain cancer. Olivia's grandfather was the physicist, Max Born.
I am hoping the cancer in her sacrum can be kept at bay and that she will have many more years. They are calling it a recurrence, not a new cancer. Was it hiding out in the bone marrow for 25 years and then made an appearance in her sacrum?
She must've done something right in her health regimen that kept her from having a recurrence for a quarter of a century.
I told a nurse that I have had DCIS and a recurrence (called residual DCIS) and she shook her head: "No, you have breast cancer." I said: "No, I had treatment. They treated it." She shook her head again: "No, you have breast cancer. It's chronic. There's no 'I HAD breast cancer.' " I am hoping and praying that it can be gone for good. The doctor said it can be gone for good, but no one can truly predict whether it will be or not for certain for the rest of your life.
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My take-away from watching that interview was her positive attitude. She said she believed she was cured and so I'm guessing that for the last 25 years she's lived without the constant fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop. What a gift she gave herself.
alian0, I asked my MO if I say "I have cancer" or "I had cancer". She very emphatically said I HAD cancer. That's the outlook I'm going with.
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Well said, Luckynumber47! Living with fear is a horrible thing and attitude plays a huge part in happiness. I think some of what Bessie said applies to me as well. My oldest friend has dealt with health issues pretty much her entire life and I've been there to witness it. She's currently dealing with horrible chronic pain from a severely broken leg that refuses to heal and required a total knee replacement (at 47) with a rod down to her ankle, among other issues. Seeing her daily struggles puts things into perspective for me, and it's easy for me to think of my diagnosis as just one of those things that happens.
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In 2009 O N-J was quoted as saying:
"Diagnosis at the age of 44 was a shock. I was your original healthy-living obsessive. I never smoked, drank only the odd glass of wine and loved to exercise. I lived by the ocean, where the air was clean."
Her diet since then has been similar and she has no history of breast, ovarian or prostate cancer in her family.
Her moving to Stage IV shows that this disease remains a worry to us all, since there is no cure.
It's fine for some to say they've had cancer, but I say I have cancer (two in fact) and will not be surprised if one or the other returns. Meanwhile, c'est la vie.
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Thanks for posting the video. I think a positive attitude helps us cope with life's ups and downs, but I don't believe it can keep cancer from returning. I agree that what ONJ was saying in the interview is that she refused to live in fear of recurrence and that she had every plan to live a long and healthy life. It seems for 25 years her healthy lifestyle and good luck have kept cancer at bay, which is wonderful. Here's hoping she can lick it again!
As to the "have/had cancer" phraseology, I'm always flummoxed by it in my own life. When people asked me straight out, I always said hat I had surgery to remove the tumor, treatment to help make sure it didn't spread, and will be on medication for years to make sure it doesn't come back. BUT, I had a recurrence 8 years after my primary, so I don't know what to say now. I mean, as far as I know I don't currently have cancer in my body. But who knows for sure?
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I'm very impressed by O.N-J's attitude--before recurrence, and now.
As for what to say about "having" or "have had" cancer--I always say NED: no evidence of disease.
Claire
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My doctors say "had" and "cured"... I'm choosing to go with their nomenclatures and not your nurse's!
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The term NED long ago replaced "remission" as the descriptor for being cancer free post treatment. It works well for me to tell friends and relatives I'm NED, but it would make me drop my guard for recurrence symptoms if I believed I was in any way cured.
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This news returning after 25 years depresses the hell out of me. I guess she will do radiation on the bone met and move on. Nobody knows what the future holds but I NEVER want to deal with cancer again.
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claireinaz - I feel exactly as you described in your post about surviving in the woods. "I have to find a way to live with the fear but not live IN fear, if you get my drift." Yes - exactly agree about some days are not easy. Some days in the woods are good and until I have to get through a swamp or bog when going for a Dr appt or tests.
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i always say HAD but also work on the woods....
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Given that her initial DX was stage 3, I actually take heart from her story. She got 25 years of being NED. That is not bad. With my DX, it was 50/50 that I would make it 5 years without a recurrence. I made the 5 years, so now I am hoping for 25. That will take me past 70, and that is good enough for me.
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Momine, your above post is rather where I was trying to get to with my previous ones as well. We both have + nodes, and my O team was very concerned. I "asked" the universe for 30 years, and that would take me to 83 (dx at age 53). If Ms. O-J got 25 years of NED, and I hope she'll get some more years of her life post-tx, I do take heart in that, too. My other projection for today is that there will be better txs in the near future that will allow all of us to live much longer even with metastases. My friend whose 3 year old got leukemia decades ago told me once that "all we can do is buy time" until we find a cure or treatments that simply freeze any c found in our bodies so it doesn't migrate anywhere else. That's all I feel I'm doing at present--buying time as knowledgeably and mindfully as I can.
I wish Ms. Newton-John a long, healthy life post-tx. I did love her music back in the mid-70s.
Claire in AZ
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Momine, I agree. I felt like I was a downer when I posted that forever is my time line that I could have a recurrence. I had held Ms. Newton-John as a bit of a inspiration as I knew how long she had been NED…selfishly sadden that it ended at 25 years as well as sadden for her. I hope in some ways this 25 years will help others, who thought 5 years was the "never come back mark", that you never reach the "never come back mark". I personally know a stage 1 woman who's BC came back at 21 years…she's 8 years at stage 4……cheering us all on to at least 25 years and much much more NED.
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Enjoy our remission years and trust it never recurs. If it does, there's a wide range of treatments which will buy us even more time. That's it in a nutshell.
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Beesie - I've also allowed for Olivia Newton John not telling the world she was Stage IV (for many years, possibly) until she was forced to cancel a concert. As an entertainer, she might probably have business reasons for not letting that piece of information out.
And i hard forgotten that she was experiencing sciatica, which I am too, now, getting worse by the day (for 5 months now) and then found this thread on a search. My MO said bone cancer would not be annoying, or annoying pain, intermittently, but I'm not too sure. My sciatica is complicated by the fact that I fell hard on my left greater trochanter about 1.5 weeks before my right (seems like piriformis, right trochanter area) started hurting. Between ONJ's sciatica and late return it just turns on those cancer worries again.
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I understand QuinnCat, I hyperanalyze every pain from time to time thinking "it might be". bc has kind of turned me into an intermittent hypochondriac
I think if pain is chronic over 2 weeks time and/or gets worse, and/or we just feel it's "not right", we are supposed to get checked out by our MOs. I bet yours is nothing, but I understand where you are coming from. I had hip pain for about 2 months a few years ago, joint pain--but I knew it was from running, walking and overuse and probably the AI I'm taking, too. Advil releived it and it wasn't all the time. Didn't feel like it was coming from "deep within", if you know what I mean...
Claire
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I am also sorry for Olivia Newton-John. At the same time, I have to believe that being able to live out half your adult life cancer-free is a wonderful thing. I also think that it's more likely to be a second primary.
As for my own life, I decided that I am "cured until proven otherwise". That is how I have chosen to live. My other learning was not to squander the time I have on this earth. My last escapade was attending a Wonder Woman birthday party for a much younger friend. It was a blast although I had too much going on to stay for the film.
I think I got a good deal in the cancer department compared to a lifelong friend and also a main squeeze who are no longer among us or those diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer which is the nonprofit work I do. I have to remember to balance work with fun stuff, because I don't want to be 10, 15, 20 years hence and remember only that I worked.
Which is why I signed up for the Tour de Blast which is overnight camping followed by a cycling event up Mount St. Helens. I will do the middle distance. (Or at least that is my plan, but I can always turn back if too steep.)
Need to get on a business call right now, but thought important to weigh in. We only get one life on this earth that I know of....not sure what "life everlasting" is other than I expect very different from the one I have now. So I am making the most of this one. - Claire
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Clairinaz - I mentioned my sciatica to my MO 2 weeks ago (it comes and goes still, but a bit more since I saw here, which was 5 months into it already). She always offers a test, but I always decline. Sometimes I rather put my head in the sand, which might not be advisable, but it is my coping mechanism. In any case, if ONJ had sciatica that caused her to cancel events, her's is far worse than mine!!
Clair_in_Seattle - love your attitude. Your dx is similar to mine and it's nice to see you are even further along since your original dx date! Have a fun trip up the mountain! I live on a volcano further south
in the Cascades - literally on it. In my good days, I would ride my bike up to the top after work on some days. Some days we'd have a husband come pick us up at the top as way to scary going fast downhill! Have fun. -
Quinncat, I do understand the head in sand thing. I sometimes avoid monthly breast self-exams like the plague for fear of finding something!-I have to force myself to complete them, and I have skipped a few months over the past years post-dx. I would tell myself it was time to do it, and then I'd avoid it for a few more weeks. I know that could be dangerous, but I do the best I can, and haven't skipped many months. My previous hip pain (probably from walking on worn-out running shoes and the AI I'm taking) went unreported to my MO even though it did last months--but it wasn't chronic, didn't get worse, and eventually went away completely.
Seattle Claire, every time I feel fear about the future I assign myself something "big" that makes me feel powerful and strong: last summer it was a complete circumnavigation of my favorite Mountain in Arizona; this year it's a 50+ mile rim walk along the Grand Canyon. Just finished 8.5 miles of the later yesterday, and I'm not even too sore. Ready for hot yoga in 3 hours....!
Arizona Claire
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Claireinaz....I wish I could go with you on your excursions! Sadly, the same chemo you got gave me permanent neuropathy (taxol). I can walk 5 miles, only every other day, otherwise, my feet are burning up. It makes me sad as I live in a glorious place to hike and it is my favorite activity.
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Dear Quinncat, cancer tx sucks. Stupid drugs, stupid c.
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Before I got my BC diagnosis 2 months ago, I had already begun an active effort to do things on my long-neglected bucket list. In the past year, I finally started checking off some of the biggies. It's a wonderful feeling to do that and feel like I am really LIVING instead of just biding time on this earth. I intend to continue to check things off my bucket list and add new items! I've had enough health issues in my life to not let any one of them make me live in fear or keep me from being grateful for every day here. (So, I certainly can't let someone else's health issues do that either.) My breast cancer is just another bump in the road. I am sure there will be many more bumps and potholes.
The fact is, none of us know when our time here will be up. Tomorrow we could be hit by the proverbial bus or any number of ways we could come to an unfortunate end. We have no control over a lot that can happen to us, but we do have control over whether or not we choose to live in fear of what might or might not happen in the future. I plan on doing all the things I can control to live a long and healthy life. As for the rest, well, I'll just have to trust that when my time is up I will have lived every day to its fullest and that I will go with no regrets.
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