Does This Outfit Make Me Look Bald?: How a Fashionista Fought Breast Cancer with Style

© 2012 by Jennifer Pellechio-Lukowiak. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/25/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-7189-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-7188-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-7187-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012905468

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Contents

Disclaimer

Preface

Volvo Driving Soccer Mom

Once In A Lifetime

My Humps

Fashion

If God Will Send His Angels

Mama Kin

Dirty Little Secret

Aliens Exist

The First Cut Is the Deepest

I Don’t Like Mondays

Stuck in the Middle

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Dye Another Day

I Am, I Am, I Am Super Woman

Bad

Clocks

Comfortably Numb

Brain Stew

Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad

June 4, 2007

Bubbly

Walk This Way

Someone’s Knocking at the Door, Somebody’s Ringing the Bell

June 9, 2007

Don’t You Forget About Me

Sweet Emotion

My Father’s Chair

My Own Worst Enemy

June 18 to 22, 2007

Nothing Left to Lose

One Step Closer

Doctor, Doctor

Without Me

Don’t Come Around Here No More

I Wanna Be Sedated

Good Riddance

My Milkshake Is Better Than Yours

Clumsy

Cancer

Tummy Taming Banana Smoothie

Oven Roasted Carrots

Happy Birthday

I Am Not My Hair

Sweet Escape

Shook Me All Night Long

The Unforgettable Fire

Pink

End of the Innocence

Rock the Kasbah

Wonderful

I Will Follow

Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

October 30, 2007

Shadows of the Night

Meet Me Halfway

Hollaback Girl

Empire State of Mind

Girls on Film

Alive and Kicking

Ring of Fire

Hot Legs

Runnin’ Down a Dream

Christmas Is All Around

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Santa Baby

Just Another New Year’s Eve

New Year’s Day

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Stand or Fall

Sweetest Good-bye

New Soul

Party Girl

Welcome to the Jungle

Big Girls Don’t Cry

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

I Know What Boys Like

Crazy

Promises in the Dark

Throwing It All Away

Destination Unknown

March 4, 2008

Rock and Roll High School

Lose Yourself

Same Old Song and Dance

She Blinded Me with Science

How to Save a Life

Suicide Blonde

When I Fall in Love

Don’t Stop Believin’

Better Days

On the Way to Cape May

One Way or Another

Never Say Never

Like a Virgin

Wonderful Tonight

Mama Kin-Redux

Since You’re Gone

Rock This Town

On the Road Again

I Will Survive

Boys of Summer

June 15, 2008

Baby Got Back

Vacation

July 2008

Fly

July 14 to 22, 2008

Just Older

All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight

Miracle Drug

Squeeze Box

Running on Empty

Head Over Heels

Na, Na, Na, Na, Hey, Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye

End of the Road

My Happy Ending

Relax

The City of Blinding Lights

January 2009

Missing You

February 2009

So Much for My Happy Ending

March 17, 2009

Shattered

Rag Doll

Uprising

Invincible

The Winner Takes It All

July 19, 2009

Wake Me Up When September Ends

Busy Being Fabulous

Acknowledgements

About the Author

For Peter and Connor

My life would be meaningless had I not been blessed with you

as my children. I am so proud of the young men you are growing into. You guys are my smile and my sunshine.

You are my Peanut and my Bean.

For Pete

Thank you for marrying me. Thank you for always respecting,

and believing in, each one of the vows we made to

each other all those years ago.

Sickness. Health. Richer. Poorer. Etc . . .

I luff you. I lurv you. I love you.

For my Dad

Not a day passes that I don’t think of you. You gifted me with your sense of humor and for that I will be eternally grateful.

Disclaimer

This book is not intended to make anyone uncomfortable. In sharing my journey with readers my aim is to promote the importance of early detection and hope. In some cases, I have changed or left out entirely the names of individuals who have played a role in my life, in order to protect their privacy. I have also, in some places, altered details, locations and other specifics to ensure these people are not recognizable, but I have not altered or changed my breast cancer experience.

Preface

Every year 5% of all breast cancer diagnoses occur in women under the age of forty. These women may be single or married; some have young children. Often they have careers and mortgages and families that depend on them. They do not have the time to be sick. When I was diagnosed, I realized how few books even acknowledge that pre-menopausal women are fighting this disease—much less how they are fighting it and balancing their lives.

I am not in the medical field. I am not a professional writer, nor am I an expert in anything other than myself. The three things I know for sure: I know how to make things pretty; I am a fantastic cook, and I love to laugh a lot. So how did I end up writing this book? For once, I listened to my mother. Right after I got the diagnosis, my mom suggested I keep a diary.

No way I replied. I am not the diary type. Then she suggested that I keep a log of doctor appointments and tests. That I could do. I began jotting down notes on scraps of paper. I kept stuffing these little notes in a folder, which also contained the mammogram films that accompanied me everywhere.

While I recovered from my second surgery, I was mostly bed-ridden. I organized my notes and made snarky comments on them like her scrubs were a fashion don’t.

I thought about how I wished I had a girlfriend to talk to who had experience with this. I would want her to give me the straight goods on the tests and treatments. No vague, broad, sweeping comments. I want balls-to-the-wall open and honest info. The nitty-gritty. No sugarcoating.

I had no resources my own age. Seems like every breast cancer survivor I was referred to was older than me by at least twenty-five years. All were diagnosed well into their fifties or older. Shortly after my diagnosis, I remember saying to a friend that when you’re our age, and you need a doctor, a GP, an Ob-Gyn, a dentist, whatever, everyone you know has someone they can recommend or even warn you against. But, when you’re our age and you need a breast surgeon and an oncologist you get a blank stare, a shrug of the shoulders, and maybe a quick answer of ‘I’ll ask my mom, she has a friend’."

I started to receive self-help books from well-intentioned friends and family members. These depressing books were so not what I needed. First of all, I needed a good laugh. I needed raw, uncomplicated language. I needed to embrace the absurdity of it all. So I began writing the book that I so desperately needed to read.

I often say I went into chemo kicking and screaming but I have no regrets. I didn’t want to be sick, look sick, or lose my hair. You know what? I got through it. I hit it hard the first time-and it was worth it.

I am writing this to help other young women who get this same diagnosis and need some hope, some answers to questions and have no one their age to talk with. Maybe this book will help someone like me-someone who has been rocked by a scary diagnosis, but wants to rock-on. Perhaps, it is for someone who needs to laugh in the face of fear. It is scary, but hell, if I can get through it, anyone can.

I realized long ago, before cancer, that if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.

I choose to laugh. I hope you do too.

Throughout your life there are things you will say for the first time that you will never forget. I love you. I’m engaged. I’m pregnant. I got the job. Monumental life changing statements met with excitement and brimming with anticipation. But what about the first time you say, I have cancer. Monumental? Hell yes. Unforgettable? You bet. Exciting? Brimming with anticipation? No.

Just the same, you will never forget the first time you say it.

Spring 2007

I cannot believe the words coming out of my own mouth.

I have breast cancer, I tell my manager over the phone, saying the words out loud for the first time and breaking down sobbing between each syllable.

Three days later, when I tell my kids, I can say it without breaking down, but I feel like I am telling them a horrible lie. I never, ever thought I would have to discuss cancer, let alone my cancer with my children. They’re still babies, at least to me. I cannot burden them with this. I can’t let their childhood become about my illness. I cannot let this define me in their eyes. I still have not wrapped my brain around this whole thing. I am thirty-eight years old. This is my very own WTF moment, and it is not fair. I feel fine; I have no family history of breast cancer, on either mom or dad’s side. I’m under forty and I’m in good health, although, fifteen pounds heavier than I’ll ever admit. But I’ve got great blood pressure and good cholesterol; I’m strong, creative, tireless, stylish, funny, slightly neurotic but always able to hold it all together, all the time.

Just, uh, not right now.

This is my story. I want to remember the details as they happened. I want to remember how I fought cancer on my own terms, with music and humor as my armor. I know as time goes by, as I heal and get well again and survive, I will forget much of what I have been through. Life has a way of doing just that. It’s like the way you forget about how painful childbirth is and you go on to have another child, and maybe even more after that. Loving each one so completely, you forget much of what you have just been through even as they stitch you up and put you back together again.

I want to remember where I’ve been.

Volvo Driving Soccer Mom

I used to be a real wild child. I used to love to do the things they tell me not to do. But now I’m different. Now I sing a new song. I really used to be a bad girl. ~ Everclear

I am a fairly laid-back person. I roll with the punches, rarely get stressed about the little things, and I find pleasure in the day-to-day. I live for good food and fine wine. I appreciate classical art, great shoes and loud rock music. I love to travel and if I can make someone laugh, I’ll be his or her friend forever. Give me an audience and I thrive. I know that I am my own person, setting my own agenda and living my life to the fullest extent possible.

I wasn’t always like that. Up until I was about fourteen years old I lived by the rules. I did what was expected of me and was a huge people pleaser. During middle school, I got bored. I didn’t want to be the Jenn that everyone thought they knew. I wanted to be exciting, cooler, more MTV than me. In trying to re-create myself, I found myself.

I became the nut, the friend that always had the crazy ideas. I would push as far as I could until I got caught. By the time I was in high school, I’d mastered cutting class. I could charm my way out of trouble even if I got caught. No one expected me to make waves so I usually got off with a warning.

My antics were the stuff of legend.

I made and sold the best cheat sheets any one had ever seen. So teeny, tiny and clearly written, you could roll them around a class ring like a roll of toilet paper and slowly unfurl them as the test progressed. I would have never passed math had I not figured that out.

I started smoking because I thought I looked edgier with a cigarette in my hand than without one. I started drinking because I found out that, for the most part, I was a pretty funny drunk. I smoked pot for a similar reason. If I was a funny drunk; I was a fucking hilarious stoner. I never went into the hard-core drugs, though. coke, acid, heroin, and X just weren’t for me.

In high school, I would tell my mom that I was sleeping at a friend’s house. Then my girlfriends and I would sneak into Greenwich Village, drink sangria and buy hip clothes and stuff that no one else in our school had. We thought we knew everything; and, man, did we think we were oh-so-cool. We would cut class in the sunny weather and head to the beach. On hot summer nights we scaled the fences between the yards in the rich neighborhoods of our town and ‘pool hop’ from house to house.

During my sophomore year of college, I thought it would be a great idea to borrow three billboards from a local train station to decorate the blank walls of our campus apartment. It wasn’t until we had them all removed that it occurred to me there was no way we could haul them back to our apartment when the only car we had was my crappy, little Nissan Sentra—a soup can with wheels. My God how hard we laughed as we drove five miles per hour holding one billboard down on top of the roof of my car while the rest of our crew followed behind us ‘subtly’ carrying the remaining two billboards. It was the slowest get-a-way in history.

I created fake ID’s to get into the best bars long before I turned twenty-one. I figured out, pretty easily, that once I got an on-campus parking ticket I could use that ticket over and over again, stuck under my windshield wiper, to park anywhere at anytime. I parked in the faculty lot for three years!

I still think of college as the best four years of my life, but, eventually, everyone grows up. Well, maybe not entirely.

Once In A Lifetime

You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

~ The Talking Heads

I got a great job designing printed fabrics in the fashion industry, met my husband, and settled down in the ‘burbs with two kids and a dog. When I go out with the friends that know me best I am still crazy, minus the ciggies and the pot. I am a mom now, after all. Of course, I always say, when the Surgeon General says Oops, I was wrong, cigarettes don’t cause cancer, go ahead and smoke ’em if you got ’em I’ll be first in line at the 7-Eleven asking for the case pricing. Maybe I’ll start again when I’m seventy, I will be one bad ass granny.

So how did I get cancer? Why did I get cancer? This filters in and out my head all day when I have time to brood. Is it because of the pot? The cigarettes? The Wonderbras? Is it some sort of karmic payback for cutting class, lying to my mom and cheating my way through high school math? There is no rational reason why I should have gotten cancer so young, but I did.

My rational mind assures me it is not because of anything I did. If people that did bad stuff got cancer we certainly wouldn’t need the death penalty. Not to mention, the hospitals would be more over-crowded than the prisons.

My grandmother is convinced that she got a hernia from sitting in a hairdresser’s chair for too many hours. We laugh every time she says this but I understand now more than ever, she is looking for a reason, a why me, an answer.

As another cancer survivor once told me, It doesn’t matter how or why you have this, you have it, so focus on fighting it.

That’s right, I think, when I start to brood. I am kicking cancer’s ass, one day at a time.

My Humps

My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps.

~ Black Eyed Peas

Late March 2007

I don’t remember the date exactly. I know that it was after my thirteenth anniversary, which was on the eighteenth, and after my girlfriend Kristin’s birthday on the twenty-third. I am showering and I bend down to shave my legs and I catch something odd out the corner of my eye. A slight shape shift in the contour of my breast. I don’t really think twice about it until later that same night, I’m undressing in my bathroom, I take off my bra, and there it is. A lump. My lump. I can see it, and I can easily feel it. It is near the surface and it was not there the day before. It is on the interior wall, next to my nipple on my right breast. It is firm and yields slightly to pressure, but it doesn’t move around. It is three days before I am due to get my period and my first assumption is it’s a big cyst, nothing more. I have cystic breasts so that’s an easy conclusion. I am not the type of person that gets a bad headache and immediately assumes it is a brain tumor. I am not the type of person that finds a lump in her breast and immediately assumes it is breast cancer.

Then, Little Miss OCD takes over and as much as I am trying to forget about my lump, it is constantly on my mind. I spend my entire turnpike