One Woman's Brave Battle with Breast Cancer

Three casino workers are newly diagnosed, one survivor said.

For myself, I banished the "why" question soon after I was diagnosed. Instead, I put the pedal to the metal of my recovery. I figure after a century of environmental degradation, is it any wonder that our bodies are showing the effects?

A reader called to tell me that our food is polluted. I don't doubt it, but one day after chemotherapy I don't have the energy to eat that food, let along talk about it. Still, I write on my paper, "nice lady." She told me that chemotherapy and radiation are bad news. I want to say, "No duh."

I focus on my paper and say, "Thank you for your call."

Before I had cancer I would have said that chemotherapy was bad. But as the Umatilla survivors knew implicitly, you can't know what choice you'll make, whether for or against treatment, until you are faced with it.

My oncologist told me, after a quick appraisal of my age, that he thinks of me as a daughter. I think that's something they learn to say at the better oncology schools.

But I don't mind having a surrogate father in this funny, little Jewish doctor from New York. He tells me that he eats Coney dogs at a pub near my house. I said, "You know, that stuff could kill you."

Driving the same Columbia River highway home from the Umatilla reservation, I put in my favorite "Dance Floor Divas" CD. I hadn't listened to dance music since I was in college. On a cold winter day when I couldn't take my usual walk for exercise, I found that I could boogey my heart rate up to an aerobic workout.

Exercise lifts my mood, and it is the best way I've found to combat chemo-caused fatigue. But the next day when I developed bloating over my liver, I called an oncologist friend.

"It is disco," he sniffed. "But organ damage is unlikely."