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Women are indeed FIGHTERS!!!
A Great Example is Gold medallist Kerryn McCann fighting to save self and baby.
Courtesy of http://www.news.com.au/
Kerryn
McCann had given herself no room for great regret. A grounded and sunny
woman, she seemed to have that perfect mix life dispenses sparsely to a
few of the fortunate.
In a career like hers, where success
could actually be measured by a clock, it seemed this marathon runner
was living two lives to her personal best -- bearing and raising kids
are regularly odd bedfellows with an athlete still in forward motion.
She'd
slowed down for her pregnancies only temporarily and was enjoying a
modest bask in the respect of her peers and the nation who cheered her
to a breathtaking marathon win in Melbourne's Commonwealth Games last
year.
But 10 weeks ago, somebody carelessly moved the witches' hats.
Two-thirds
of the way through her third pregnancy, she was diagnosed with a
category three breast cancer, the most aggressive type. Her child was
delivered six weeks early so she could fast-track chemotherapy
treatment.
Since then, McCann, 40, has been pushing against a tide of demons to get out of the rough.
She's
winning the toughest mental fight of her life, but daily untangling the
string of small regrets and guilts for things out of her control.
"I know the most important thing is to get better. But it's just hard, feeling robbed at this time,''
says McCann, with a soft glance down at six-week-old Cooper.
Regret
at not being able to breastfeed her newborn. Feeling deprived of that
spotless joy that should come with ushering in a new life. Heartache at
seeing him in a snarl of feeding tubes and drips.
Guilt that
her well-publicised plight has drawn so much attention, when an army of
other women who have endured the same has gone unnoticed.
Rueful
frustration that she didn't get the lump in her breast seen to months
earlier when she first noticed it. Embarrassment she knew nothing about
breast cancer until it hit her.
And, up there with the hardest
of all, the wrench at seeing Greg, her husband of 16 years, falter with
her own freshly exposed mortality.
But unless they had said
so, you would not know the McCann house in Coledale, north of
Wollongong in NSW, was experiencing anything except that cocoon-like
hush that wads a family in the early weeks of a newborn's homecoming.
The
turmoil didn't dump on them suddenly; rather, it rose like floodwaters.
McCann noticed a small lump at the lower part of her right breast early
in her pregnancy but thought nothing of it.
It grew a little
and it seemed to be fixed inside her chest wall. Unconcerned, she
didn't mention it to her doctor until the sixth month, when it was
shaped like a 2.5cm-long key.
"Even then, I didn't think it
was serious -- I only mentioned it because I thought it was a blocked
milk duct and it would affect my breastfeeding,'' McCann says.
But
the wave of health professionals who swept McCann from her feet in the
rush to the surgeon's operating table soon convinced her of its
gravity.
Not initially, though. Early on, she remembers feeling annoyed at all the commotion. She isn't one for fuss.
"After
one test I came out feeling really angry that they should stress a
pregnant woman so much over probably nothing,'' she says.
"I was not in a high-risk group; there was no family history of breast cancer.''
But biopsies confirmed the unexpected worst and the couple were fearful of the future for the first time.
Her three main doctors -- surgeon, obstetrician and oncologist -- embarked on a mini-debate about how things should proceed.
The
oncologist believed the tumour needed to be shrunk by chemotherapy
before the surgeon removed it, but the obstetrician said this could
harm her unborn child, so surgery went ahead without the chemo.
The lump and three lymph nodes -- one node the cancer had spread to -- were removed without incident.
``It
was hard, but I left it up to them, really,'' she says. ``I certainly
didn't want to harm my baby, but I wanted to live, too. There were two
us to think about.''
After that early activity, McCann,
quietly spoken and generous in her conversation, chuckles about the
aches and pains she felt after surgery.
``Oh, it's in my hips,
in my shoulder,'' she says dramatically, describing her baseless worry
the cancer was showing up elsewhere in her body.
