Each Day Fully Lived

For Susan Leach, life couldn’t have been much sweeter. She had left her job as a chartered accountant to be a stay-at-home mom to her two daughters. She and her husband, John, had just moved into a new home. “On a number of occasions, John and I sat back and said, ‘How much better can life be?’” recalled Leach. “We both felt very blessed.”

Then, in October 2005, Leach felt a small lump in her breast. Her mind did not immediately race to thoughts of cancer. After all, she had turned 40 earlier that year and breast cancer is a disease that overwhelmingly afflicts women 50 or older. Leach had always been in exceptional health and carried none of the risk factors associated with breast cancer, such as obesity or a family history of the disease. But in December, her doctor told her she had breast cancer.

What goes through one’s mind at such a moment?

“Dying,” responds Leach. “That’s where you automatically go. You are terrified and you wonder, Will this be my path? Will I not be here to see my children graduate from school, to attend their marriages, to play with my grandchildren? But my husband and I decided ‘That will not be our story.’”

Three days before Christmas, Leach underwent a lumpectomy (a partial mastectomy). Because of the holidays, the pathology results would be slow in coming. The family had planned a 10-day Caribbean cruise starting on December 29. They decided to go ahead with it. “We could have all sat here and stared at each other as we waited for more information or we could go on the cruise,” says Leach. “We chose the latter and I’m glad we did. It provided a lot of opportunities for focusing on something else.”

When they returned to Calgary Leach was given the good news that the cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes and the prognosis for a full and lasting recovery looked good. She had every reason to believe she would be among the two out of three women who are diagnosed with breast cancer and who do not die of the disease.

Leach began chemotherapy treatment in January, followed by radiation therapy. She was also put on a year-long treatment of herceptin, an antibody that attacks the cancer-enhancing protein HER2, as well as tamoxifen, a drug that blocks the ability of estrogen to feed cancer growth. Together, these treatments are meant to kill any cancer missed by the original surgery and to reduce the risk of tumour cells returning at a later date. The side-effects from her treatments were relatively modest. She suffered minor nausea from the chemotherapy as well as the inevitable — and, to her, quite devastating — hair loss. Radiation therapy sometimes left her fatigued. But the biggest impact has been on the way she looks at life.

“I’ve always been the kind of person who was very busy, who constantly went from one thing to the next,” says Leach. “I’m really bad at taking time for myself. Now, I know that taking care of me and my physical health has to be a priority.”

Even in the midst of her cancer treatments, Leach decided to start training for the 2006 Weekend to End Breast Cancer event, held in both Calgary and Edmonton. In part, Leach simply wanted something healthy to focus on as she recovered. She also felt a sense of gratitude, knowing that the $50,000 a year it costs for herceptin treatment* — for her and more than 100 other Alberta women — was raised in large part at the Alberta Cancer Foundation’s 2005 inaugural Weekend to End Breast Cancer walk in Calgary. She’s doing her part to give back, too — Leach is one of the biggest single fundraisers for the Calgary event, with $20,000 pledged to her two-day, 60-kilometre walk.

But most of all, Leach hopes that the research funded through the annual walk will help finally crack the puzzle that is breast cancer so that her children and grandchildren might be spared. “I wouldn’t ever wish what I’ve gone through on my daughters,” says Leach. “I’m very hopeful that by the time they are in their 20s, we’ll know a lot more and may even have a way to prevent this disease. Wouldn’t that be great?”

* Herceptin is now funded in Alberta to treat early-stage breast cancer.