There are so many posts in my mind left unwritten. My detailed birth story for one, more on postpartum life and falling in love with my new baby. But life is moving faster than I can write about while soaking up every minute with my sweet new baby, now almost 5 months old!
When I first started blogging about my pregnancy and breast cancer diagnosis, I had hope for a specific kind of “ending” to the story. I go through pregnancy with the cancer treatments with some challenging emotions and experiences intertwined with a lot of magical experiences, too, of advocating for myself and having an incredible and inspiring birth story to tell (which I did have! The perfect undisturbed home birth). When it turned out post surgery I would still need more chemo, I knew that meant the odds were no longer in my favour for a good prognosis. I put my head down and quit breastfeeding, switching to generously donated donor milk, in hopes more chemo would get us the outcome we wanted -even though it was now much less likely: a probable long life mothering my new baby. I was going to share my rad birth story after overcoming all these unfathomable challenges and a message of “and the pathology is great! Cancer seems like it’s all gone! It worked!”
Unfortunately, recent testing has shown that the cancer has spread, to more lymph nodes and to some bones in my body. Medical treatment is now limited to a few variations of chemotherapy with the expectation no longer being to “cure” me, but to try to slow the spread and extend my life, as well as radiation as needed for pain management (I’ve had one of those already and it worked like a hot damn, but what a sci-fi like experience, I tell ya). The chemotherapy options are fairly limited and are statistically speaking are limited in terms of how long they usually extend life by, but the hope is I respond better to it than average to buy more time for my daughter, and I will continue to supplement my medical treatment with lifestyle and additional healing modalities that resonate with me.
No matter how I word my post, if I’m my authentic, realistic, pragmatic, and honest self, some of you will be tempted to see that as negativity or giving up, which it is DECIDEDLY not. If I’m all sunshines and flowers and lollipops some of you will think I’m in denial and see through my inauthenticity in ten seconds flat. Please read the rest of my post(s) and notice any presumptions and projections that might come up for you, and quietly set them to the side before chucking them in my direction.
If you google it, the statistical average length of survival you will find for a person with metastatic triple negative breast cancer like I have is around a year. I share that KNOWING I am not a statistic, and may personally fall anywhere on either side of that curve. I don’t need a huge movie pep talk telling me “don’t believe that stats!” or “just keep believing!” I know how stats work and I know a statistical average isn’t a crystal ball guaranteeing anything about me personally. Hopefully I’m a farrrrrrrrrr right outlier! I have lots on my side, including sheer will and motivation which by now ya’ll know I have a lot of. I have a newborn baby who I’m so in love with that I can’t help but continue to have my days full of smiles and laughs and joy, and I take care of my health in a well-rounded holistic and nourishing way in addition to my medical care. Nonetheless, I like facts, and the facts are that I may not (likely don’t) have long to live. Cancer is real, the kind I have is particularly aggressive, it of late had been spreading fast, and only time will tell how long I can work with my body to stay as feeling healthy and strong and, you know, alive, as I do now.
The space I am in right now feels like a sacred one. the privilege of having time to reflect on my mortality, of thinking about what I would want to leave behind for my daughter, of how I want to spend my days. There’s a country song (I am from Alberta after all) with a line that says “I hope someday you get the chance to live like you were dying,” (Tim McGraw), and in a way that’s how I feel. Time with family feels more important than ever, and I’ve already had one healing and nourishing visit with my parents and a peaceful one with my grandparents, and my sis and her family are here now. ( I DARE you to judge my COVID times social distancing faux pause. I dare you.)
I’m having deeper conversations with my husband. I am planning lots of time out of town, being where I feel my best, in nature, in the ocean, in the wild, soaking up the healing properties of mother earth. I am making sure I don’t waste a minute of time with my baby, my husband, my family, and in nature where I feel my strongest and happiest and healthiest and most loved. I will remain open to the possibility of being a statistical outlier that stays healthy and able to mother my baby for longer than expected, and prepare what I need to for myself and my baby in case I don’t, because preparing brings me peace and comfort, a healthy and productive outlet for what would otherwise be paralyzing thoughts about what my daughter’s life might be like without me.
I will prepare for my eventual death like I would prepare for a birth. No expectations about when it will happen. It’s not inherently better or worse for it to be early or late. I want it to happen at home and in a beautiful and and comfortable space. I want myself and my family to be midwifed through it. I will work with my body to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible and trust that when it happens it will be the right time for my body. I will prepare the people around me for it the way I would prepare them to attend a birth. With reverence, with awe. It can be a powerful transition out of life instead of into it. All emotions welcome. I won’t wait for it or expect it or sign myself up for it before I need to, and I won’t be terrified of it, either. I will simply prepare for it in sacredness and work with it when it comes, whatever that looks like.
I am not afraid to die. I am not afraid of pain. The tragedy for me lies in the potential of leaving my daughter without a mother long before I want her to be without one. It is the risk of this that calls me forward to prepare, so I can leave her with as much mothering as I can, and leave as much of myself behind for her as possible if I have to leave her too early.
I have adapted a common affirmation we use in birth to my current process:
I TRUST MY BODY to take care of me the best way it can.
I TRUST MY BABY to be strong and resilient with or without me.
I TRUST MY BREATH to carry me through any waves of fear or discomfort or pain that may come
We don’t need much except for quality time and the occassional cabin getaway if anyone has a spare waterfront cabin lying around for me and my family and my dog to hang out at in between my chemo treatments. I still like swimming and I still like the wild. Kaedra also is taking breastmilk donations! If you have milk to spare get in touch with Dawn who is handling that for me ( dawn.henderson@hotmail.com). We continue to be midwifed by my incredible community who is relentless in their support, and our families and friends are by our sides through thick and thin. We have the best people around us we could ask for.
Kendal Blacker Photography
Please trust I have an amazing and varied team of people I really trust for opinions, advice, and resources, and don’t need more unless I reach out and ask for it!
I really, really mean this. Many of you will have ideas you think are simply so good that you think you’d be doing me a disservice by not sharing. Please hear me when I say that is more for you than for me. In fact, it’s harmful to me. I know you love me, and feel so helpless, and want to do anything you can to help (ideas below), and for that I am so grateful. But, you probably can’t use google much better than I can, you probably don’t know many more holistic practitioners and healers as I do in person, probably don’t know as many people as I do in person who also have had breast cancer which they treated in various ways with various philosophies, you probably know very little about the *specific type* of cancer I have (metastatic triple negative breast cancer), nor become more of an expert than me on it by starting your research now. You don’t know what I’m already doing and what I’ve already chosen not to and don’t want to revisit or think about.
Your presumptions that I need more input and ideas, while well intended, are actually harmful. They send me the (I KNOW UNINTENTIONAL) message that you think I’m not already doing enough, not doing it right. It sends the unintended message that maybe it’s my own fault the cancer is spreading because I just don’t have the right diet, don’t take the right supplements, don’t see the right healer, don’t have the right mindset. I’m doing plenty, and I’m doing what feels right to me. I’m eating well. Some of you think I should be vegan, some of you think I should be carnivore, some of you think I should fast, but trust I am eating in a way that is nourishing and feels like the right healthy thing for me. I avoid sugar. My whole pregnancy I drank zero alcohol and zero caffeine. I exercise. I’m taking immune boosting and cancer treating supplements, and choosing them carefully so as to avoid overlapping ones with chemotherapy that carry a risk of decreasing the effectiveness of chemo (that risk exists). I have practitioners I see to care for my body in ways I feel it needs caring. I am nourishing my mind with meditations and visualizations and counselling and mindsets that feel like the right things for me. I’m exploring additional ways to care for myself with people I want to explore things with. I’m caring for my medical, physical, emotional, and spiritual health, and practicing trusting my intuition in it all.
No one wants me to live more than I do. No one is more motivated to mother my child for as long as possible than me. You care about me a lot, but not more than I care about myself. I am a motivated and determined person who is good at being in action. I don’t want more unrequested ideas, they hurt me and cause me stress, they don’t help. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are, I KNOW they are good! But the impact of your best laid plans matters, is individual to me, and I ask my boundary on this to be respected fully. I am well resourced, and know how to ask for more resources from the folks I want suggestions from. It’s not being closed minded or lazy, I promise, I just know what I want and what I don’t want and who I want it from, and that I only want it on specific request. If you have some magic potions you want to drop off at my door, feel free to arrange to leave some at the doorstep, but don’t text me about “have you heard about this or that, or seen this video or that video, have you thought of this, have you thought of that? Are you reading this are you reading that” unless I’ve reached out to you and asked.
When you want to reach out to show me your love and care and presence and willingness to be a resource, a message of my strength and resilience and my commitment to my daughter is welcome.
Gary isn’t wanting to talk or receive a bunch of messages of care and support and acknowledgement from me posting this, as he currently finds it a bit re-traumatizing. He is grateful for all his friends and family, has some close folks looking out for him, and will reach out when he’s ready!
HOW TO HELP if you feel the need to “do”:
Reaching out to my friend Dawn (dawn.henderson@hotmail.com) is the best way to figure out what’s needed, being organized that you can contribute to and how best to contribute to us if you feel called to do so. I consider Dawn my community care midwife, and you can get in touch with her to offer precious ounces of your pumped and donated milk, to offer your name to go on the meal train list if we need to start that up again at some point, or to pitch in to the nice-to-haves fund that our community keeps spontaneously collecting for us and Kaedra (somewhat against our will, but are humbly grateful for and using well!), are all helpful ways our friends have organized to make it easy for folks who want to contribute to us in some tangible way… though it’s certainly not expected! We know we are loved and that different people want to show it in different ways and we are grateful for Dawn and others making it easy for people who feel called to “do something” for us.
If I have impacted your life or your work somehow, or you have a fun memory of me to share or story of who I am to you, my friend Morag is collecting self-recorded videos of people from all walks of my life to compile for Kaedra in case I’m not here for her to get to tell all my stories to in person and she can grow up knowing her mom. You can email videoclips to her at moraghastings@gmail.com. They don’t have to be fancy and you don’t have to look good. Just send something in you make while drinking coffee in your PJs if you feel called to!
If you are a birth worker, the biggest gift you can give me is to do good work. Share your knowledge, teach folks about normal birth. If I taught you anything good about birth, share it! And give me credit for teaching you, hahaha, I am not free of ALL ego yet. It fills my birth-soul up to hear about how my students are taking their learning forward. Debunk myths. Inspire people. Contribute to people discovering a side of birth that is a well-kept secret in our culture and stand strong in your commitment to walking with families through incredible births they may not even have known were possible. Challenge the status quo, and don’t enable an abusive and unhealthy system our of fear. Use your voice and make real change, a real difference. Be brave. Even if you have to fake that bravery at first. It will come.
One more thing is, I would consider it a hugely healing favour if, you know, we could all stop killing black people, both with overt violence and our complicitness in the racist systems our society is built on and we are deeply a part of, intentionally or not, by our very nature of existing within it, and have a responsibility to dismantle. That would be helpful and appreciated.
Please don’t think of me as sick or treat me as ill. When you speak of me, call it what it is: cancer! Not a euphemism that comes with extra connotations. You don’t usually call people taking medications for chronic heart disease “sick”. You say they have heart disease. I have rogue cells doing bad things in my body and trying to establish themselves in unwanted and harmful places, and for whatever reason they have so far been doing that faster than my body can keep up with to clear on it’s own, and that’s called cancer. But I feel healthy and strong and happy most of the day, aside from some leg pain that is not stopping me from doing the things and feeling run down from the new chemo (which hurts like a motherfckr going in, I tell ya. I’m using all my labour-coping skills to make it a better experience and visualizing it being healing medicine flushing through my veins). I am meeting challenging emotions and sensations as they come and go, and embracing how well and strong I DO feel. Know my family is going through something really big and intense, and that we will continue to benefit from the community support we’ve had so much of, but don’t make me a sickly person in your mind before I AM one, while I’m so focused on feeling well!
Please don’t refer to my experience as my “battle” with cancer. I don’t want to feel like I’m in a war with my body. I love my body, I will stand strong alongside my body. My body is doing the best it can, despite the breakdowns in healthfulness it is having. It’s doing its best. As my acupuncturist friend Shannon Larson always says “My body loves me.” That feels *for me* like a more healthy and productive mindset than being in battle with it.
If you want to talk about how I look, you can tell me I look good and healthy and strong or say nothing. You don’t need to point out my hair or lack of it as if I didn’t notice myself unless it’s in a way that is complimentary or unless I’m the one to bring it up! Treat me like a birthing person whose space I surely hope you would not walk into during the throws of roaring out a baby and tell her all about how tired and run down she looks (if you do do this, stop it right this second and change your ways!), or how her hair doesn’t look the same as usual unless it’s to tell her that she’s amazing, she is strong, she is powerful. Words are hypnotic, use them wisely. With me, and with everyone else you know! (A good lesson from Gloria Lemay).
I know Kaedra is surrounded by folks that love her. She has Gary, she has his family, she has my family, she has my incredibly nurturing and committed friends. But our families don’t live in the same city, and none of these people are me. None of these people are her mom who she was born to with the intention of being mothered by. And huge adjustments and fenagling and negotiating is going to have to happen to get her to be loved and raised as close to the way as I would want for her as possible, and it’s impossible to perfectly plan because we just don’t know what the exact future holds, not to mention our families and communities being spread out between Vancouver and Alberta!
I feel grateful that I have time to prepare consciously for the end of my life and what I want to leave behind to make sure my daughter is as set up as she can be, that she is cared for and has as much of me left behind as possible. I will allow myself the grace of feeling anger and injustice and grief when those feelings come up too, because those are real too, and important to allow myself to move through. I would never, ever choose to leave my daughter, and I will continue to do everything I can to give myself the best chance of staying with her for as long as possible, grateful for every minute, every day, every month I have with her. While I am far from grateful for having cancer (it’s pretty effing unfair period, but for the love of whatever God you do or don’t believe in, do I have to be dealing with it during pregnancy and now with a brand new baby ?!), but I can be grateful to have this time to focus on what matters to me most, and to spend each day wisely as if it is the first and only day I’ll every get, to give Kaedra the best version of myself now and every day and for as long as I can, the way I was taught by Gloria Lemay to attend births as if they are the first and only birth I will get to attend. The only birth, the only day, the only moment, in the world.
I read an article about miscarriage (Angela Garbes, quote by Kristen Swanson) once that said “women are made for birth and life and death.” I feel that way. I’m just as made for death as I was for birth and I am for life. Really, we all are, made to be born and made to die. I will embrace them all in their own time as they come, though I will stay committed to embracing life for as long as I possibly can, because I do like being here an awful lot, do love mothering an awful lot, do love my family an awful lot and want with all my heart to get to stay as long as I can <3.
Talia and Meena continue to take clients while I’m away from on-call life, and I may be doing some teaching soon, COVID permitting. Keep sending your birthing families to my website for resources and support. If you are a repeat client, feel free to reach out to me for referrals or to connect, even though I will not be able to commit to taking on clients as a primary support person anytime soon. Birth Takes a Village. Cancer Takes a Village. Life Takes A Village. A Village To Raise A Child. And all that.
I leave you with a song I’ve been listening to on repeat the last few days, and a few suggestions of resources for anti-racism learning:
Anti-Racism Resources:
- Resistance & Resurgence: Confronting Anti-black racism in Canada free online event Monday June 8th by @feministsdeliver
- Scaffolded Anti-Racism Resources listed by level/stage/energy/capacity you are starting from
- 10 Steps To Non-Optical Allyship by @mireillecharper
- Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead of Getting a Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You
- White Ally Vs White Accomplice Vs White Co-Conspirator, by @theblackdoula
- Birth Workers Can Be Racist by @birthworkersofcolor
Photos in post by Kristie Robin Photography and Kendal Blacker Photography, two rad doulas and photographers in town.