Reprinted from Indian Country Today

One Woman's Brave Battle with Breast Cancer

By Kara Briggs
Indian Country Today

Editor's note: Yakama journalist Kara Briggs has chronicled her battle with breast cancer in a bimonthly series of highly personal columns in Indian Country Today. This offering shares her growing knowledge of a sensitive and traumatic challenge in her own life and resonates with courage and commitment.

Reaffirming self-esteem

I shoved my 1988 Chevy Blazer into fifth gear and lodged my right heel in a hole in the carpet. Call it a poor man's cruise control. I gunned it east on Interstate 84 from Portland to the Umatilla Indian Reservation, where my friend Cece Whitewolf had called a meeting of cancer survivors.

Kara Briggs

Cece survived breast cancer six years ago and founded the nonprofit Native People's Circle of Hope to help other Native cancer survivors. The way she sees it, there are no cancer patients, only people surviving another day.

Breast cancer, diagnosed in early January, is an unexpected detour in my life. I am nearing the halfway point in my chemo. My husband and my aunt, who beat breast cancer 25 years ago, are helping me through a disease that will strike 1 in 7 American women.

But at least during this three-hour drive into the desert, I've decided to put cancer out of my mind. I've longed for this open highway along the Columbia River. My traveling companions are Cece, who is Umatilla, and a Warm Springs friend who is battling colon cancer.

Cece's husband scolded her for taking us so far away from our doctors and hospitals. But she knew that the medicine we needed was only to be found on a sunny day in March, on a highway that runs along this massive river.

We are in good company.