Call her a breast cancer fighter, not survivor
BY JEFF BISHOP
THE TIMES-HERALD
Jeanie Bunn is often called a "breast cancer survivor." She doesn't think of it that way.
"I'm a cancer fighter. I am not a cancer survivor," said the 48-year-old mother of four.
"People always say, 'Oh, you're going to be fine,' or they say, 'Oh, my mother had breast cancer, and she got better.' But you know what? For me, it's just not true. Let's get real. I am surviving, but I am not a survivor. I classify myself as a fighter, and I'm going to keep fighting this to survive just as long as I can."
Bunn said that when she first noticed a change in her breasts, she did not suspect that breast cancer could be the cause.
"I have no history of breast cancer in my family at all," said Bunn. "So I really and truly never thought that much about it."
She had none of the risk factors. She did not smoke, she did not drink, she was not taking hormones, and she had her first child when she was 21.
"So it never entered my mind," said. "I always watched my weight. I always exercised and tried to eat healthy. I did all those things you're supposed to do."
Around Christmas time in 2005, Bunn noticed that her breasts seemed harder than usual.
"And it was in both breasts, and I thought, 'That's really strange,'" she said. "But I just blew it off and thought, 'Well, maybe it's just because I'm over 40.'"
Her symptoms persisted through the holidays and through the first of the year, however, so she finally made an appointment to see the doctor in February. She was sent to get a mammogram and an ultrasound.
"And my doctor was smart about it. He told me, 'I don't care what the radiologists tell you, I want you to get a second opinion from a general surgeon.'"
The radiologist "didn't see anything but a lot of dense tissue," she said. "Nothing to be concerned about." But she did like her doctor told her and made an appointment with a general surgeon to take a biopsy, anyway.
He didn't tell her right away that he suspected she had breast cancer, but Bunn said she could tell something was up.
"They waited and didn't want to tell me until they got the official pathology report back," she said. "I realize now that he probably already knew, or at least suspected, but he didn't want to tell me until he was sure."
It was cancer, it was in both breasts, and it was severe. Suddenly Bunn had to Google terms like "invasive lobular carcinoma."
"My doctor was kind of funny about it," she said. "He was like, 'Are you okay? Do you need a prescription for some stress medicine? Do you have an oncologist?' Of course I didn't have an oncologist. I'd never had cancer before."
He recommended that she make an appointment at Winship at Emory Hospital. In fact, he made the appointment for her immediately.
"This was on Wednesday, and my appointment was scheduled for Friday," she said. "He told me, 'If you were my daughter, or my wife, this is where I'd want you to go.' I deeply appreciate that."
Bunn began an aggressive treatment that included chemotherapy and a bilateral mastectomy.
"The doctor at Emory told me, 'It's very severe, and we need to be very aggressive with this treatment in order to save your life.' That's exactly how he put it. So I said okay. Let's do what we have to do."
From that point, everything became "a blur," she said.
Bunn said that her first time sitting in the "chemo chair" was "kind of like an out-of-body experience."
"I was in shock," she said. "I was scared. A gut-wrenching kind of scared. And there I was, sitting in that dad-gum chemo chair, looking at rows of people who looked so sick. And I thought, 'Is this real, or is it some kind of a bad dream?'"
But Bunn said she's come to believe that "God puts some kind of mechanism" in the human brain that can be drawn upon to help get through experiences like these.
"I've talked to a lot of other friends who have been through this, now that I'm in a support group," she said. "And they've experienced this, too. Time just slows down. And when it slows down, you can process it better, the things that are happening to you. It's like you're a deer in the headlights, and you just freeze. It feels just that way. And you just go through the motions. It's very, very odd."
That mechanism wasn't much help when it came to talking about her cancer diagnosis with her children, however.
"Jennifer was in college, and Jake had just graduated high school and was going to West Georgia. But I had two other children still at home. My daughter, Abby, was 4, and Tyler was 7."
Bunn's children were used to her being sick and "mommy going in for tests" because of an unrelated auto-immune disorder, she said. But her kids could tell that this time was different.
"I was on the phone with my brother, Marty, in Texas. Abby was doodling on a piece of paper. My son Tyler was standing beside me. And I just started crying. And when I get off the phone, Tyler looks at me. He says, 'Why are you crying, Mama?' He looked at me really strange. I told him, 'Mommy's sick.' He tilted his neck and then he asked me, 'Have you got cancer?'"
Bunn said she wasn't even aware that her younger children even knew what cancer meant.
"I've always been very open with my children. I said yes, yes I do. And he knew this was a very bad thing. That this was serious. He's a very observant little child. And he started crying, and Abby started crying. We were all just crying together."
Her older children dealt with the news a bit differently. Her oldest son, Jake, "was devastated," but he was more "angry than anything else," she said.
"He was like, 'This is unfair.' This is unfair that this is happening to his mom. And Jennifer was not necessarily angry, but she was very confused by it. What was hard for me was seeing the fear in my children's eyes. When I'm talking with them about these things, I'm not so sure that I'm doing it so well.
"But I just tell them, I don't know why these things happen. It's just a part of life. It may not seem fair, but it's just part of it, and you just deal with it the best way you can. You do your best with a bad situation, regardless of what the situation is, it doesn't matter. It might be an illness, or it may be something else. Things are not always going to be good in life. Life won't always go your way. Life may get really hard. But you do the best you can."
Bunn said her diagnosis has forced her to re-think her expectations about her life. "I have two older children who I got to see grow up and go off to college," she said. "I was able to witness a lot of milestones, the kind of things that, as a parent, you look forward to. And I can't help but think about the fact that, with Tyler and Abby, I just don't know. I don't know if I'll get to see Tyler graduate from high school, or go to his first day of college. I don't dwell on that, but you can't help but think about it sometimes."
She said the fact that she's lost friends from her cancer support group has driven home the reality of her situation even more.
"They were doing really well, and then the next time you see them, they're not doing so well. And you know in the back of your mind that that will be you one day. Regardless of anything you do, that's going to be you. It's scary. And it's sad. Nobody wants to die."
She said she had always planned to "live to a ripe old age of 90-something," just like her grandparents.
"Everyone in my family, my aunts and uncles and grandparents, they all lived healthy lives, and lived a long time. I always took it for granted, I guess, that I would be just like them. That I'd have my grandkids over to my house to make cookies and ice cream. And it does make you sad that that's probably not reality. It's hard sometimes, knowing what you may miss out on. So I'm not taking anything for granted, anymore. Especially the little things. The simple things."
Last year Bunn thought she had reached the end of her road. Since her diagnosis, she'd already had her breasts removed, and had been forced to undergo a complete hysterectomy.
"My cancer has been a very hard one to deal with because my hormones were basically feeding my cancers," she said. "I didn't know early on that my cancer had already metastasized to my ovaries and my cervix. That kind of puts everything in a whole different ballgame."
Still, Bunn had been doing relatively well until April 2010, when a tumor developed behind her right eye.
"My eye had been hurting, and I was having a lot of headaches. I didn't know what was going on. And unfortunately I found out I had a tumor."
She could choose either radiation treatments, or have the eye removed.
"It doesn't respond to chemo when it's in your eye, so those are your only options," she said.
She opted for the treatments. "I'm running out of body parts that can be removed," she said. "I only have a few more left." But, even with the treatments, soon she found herself unable to eat.
"I was just not feeling good. I would be hungry, and I would sit down to eat, and I just couldn't."
Strangely, she was gaining weight -- about 20 pounds. She also developed a fever that wouldn't go away.
"At first they thought it might be an infection, maybe a sinus infection, but what virus or infection lasts for two months?"
She wound up in the hospital again, dehydrated and weak. That's when they found that her cancer had spread to her liver and intestines. So much fluid had built up in her digestive system that she would wake up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe.
"Being sick sucks," said Bunn. "Having a serious illness sucks. And people tell you, 'Oh, you're so strong.' No I'm not. I am a human being. I am doing the best I can in a bad situation. Don't put that 'Super Cancer Woman' label on me. I don't like that. There ain't nothing super about having cancer."
Bunn's youngest child, Abby, asked her to promise her that she wouldn't die.
"I've learned that sometimes even when I don't feel good I can't act like I'm sick, because my kids get really worried," she said. "Even if it's just a bug I get for a few days, they get very concerned. So that's a huge stress on my family. I think that's true for anyone with a serious illness. I lost my hair, which they didn't understand. But they were cool with it.
"But then Abby would say, 'Promise me. You promise me that you're not going to die.' Abby, I'm not going to tell you that. I can't make that promise. But what I will tell you is that I will fight and do the best I can not to die."
Bunn said that even though she doesn't expect to live to her 90s like her grandparents, she does have a more modest goal in mind.
"I have told my doctors, I know the severity of my illness. That's been very hard to come to terms with. But I know that, eventually, this disease will get me. It's just a matter of when.
"So I told my doctors. I said, 'Look, just please help me to at least see Abby graduate from high school.' She's in fifth grade now. I said, 'If you'll do your best to help me reach that goal, I will do whatever I need to do, on my end.'
"Really and truly, if I can see her graduation, any years I may get past that, those will just be bonus years," said Bunn.
Bunn said that, in spite of everything, she feels "very fortunate."
"Even though it's a bad situation, I've had access to good medical care. I have good doctors. I have people who have been supportive. I have good friends who have been there for me.
"Everyone has to deal with bad things that happen. I don't care if it's losing your job, or a divorce, or losing a child. And I have tried, although I am not always successful, by no means, but I have tried to pull as much good out of the bad as I can."
She said it's still difficult to answer the serious and sometimes very direct questions from her children.
"In my opinion, children do better if you're up front with them and let them ask questions, and then you do your best to help them understand," she said. "All of a sudden when Abby was at softball practice, Abby told me, 'I sure hope I don't get breast cancer when I get older.' I can tell that's in the back of her little mind, all the time. And I just told her, 'Abby, hopefully by the time you are my age, they will have figured this out. Maybe it won't happen to you. And maybe you can tell your daughter, in all honesty, 'You will not get this.'"
It's "scary," she said, when she thinks about the statistics, which say that one in eight women will develop breast cancer at some point in their lives.
"I look around at my daughters, at their friends, and my friends and family members, at their daughters. Which one will it be? Which of them is the 1 in 8?"
Bunn said that it always seemed to her when she was growing up in a small, Southern community that no one had to worry about such things.
"It's just weird that nowadays breast cancer seems to be so prevalent. When I was young, you just didn't hear about it. They say it's because there's better detection. But people, even in their 50s and 60s, all seemed healthy and everybody just kind of clicked along. They were healthy, unless they got in a car wreck or went off to war. That's what it seemed like to me, anyway."
Bunn said that her cancer is something she always has to monitor and be aware of, "but you don't want to be a hypochondriac, either."
"It's really a crazy thing to get drawn into. It's stressful for your whole family. And it's just ongoing.
"All I can compare it to, it's like being out in the middle of the ocean. And you can see the land. And you just keep paddling and paddling. And the waves keep pushing you back. And if you could ever just get to the land, things would be wonderful. Maybe one day we'll have an answer."
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