Tears and Rainbows: Ginny Mason, Cancer Advocate

Then her husband told her, "Your breast looks sick."  She saw the doctor who ordered a mammogram.  When the technician told her it was fine, Ginny did something uncharacteristic for her; she spoke up and insisted that the doctor examine her.  Ginny, a licensed practical nurse, was used to accepting doctors' authority, but she knew something was wrong and that she needed more information.

Her primary care physician said she had nothing to worry about but sent her to a surgeon in case she had a cyst that needed draining.  However a combination of factors delayed her appointment with the surgeon for six months.  On a Friday in March, 1994, she received the results of her biopsy.  "The doctor came in and took my hand.  I knew it wasn't good," she said.  Ginny had also been undergoing tests for a gall bladder problem and assumed the doctor's expression meant that she was going to need gall bladder surgery.

Instead he told her, "You have a very aggressive breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer."  In fact, the doctor wanted to start chemo that very same day.  Her prognosis wasn't good; even with treatment she would probably live only twelve to eighteen months.  Once again, Ginny found the courage to tell a doctor, "No"

She hadn't had any idea that the worsening problems in her breast could be cancer.  There was no way that she was going to call her husband and tell him she needed a ride home from the doctor's office because she had just completed her first chemotherapy treatment for a deadly cancer.  If this hadn't killed her in six months, two more days of waiting wasn't going to make a difference.

            She agreed to start chemo on Monday.  Then she went back to work and finished out the day.  It was raining on her forty-five minute drive home from work.  She spent every minute trying to process the news the doctor had given her struggling to find the words to tell her husband.

After all that careful orchestration of the best way to break the news, she went inside and blurted out, "I have cancer, and I'm probably going to die."  The rain poured down outside as they cried and tried to understand how this could have happened to a forty-year-old with no family history of breast cancer.  What would this mean for them and their children?

When they were all cried out, they looked up and through their window saw the most beautiful rainbow stretched across the sky.  That's when they knew that it would be OK.  To Ginny and her husband, "OK" did not mean that the treatment would work and that she would be cancer free.  It meant that they would find the faith and strength to cope with whatever happened.