Among the hundreds of teams walking tomorrow in the North Shore Medical Center Cancer Walk, there is one bound to get a giggle. They call themselves the Cleavage Club. They have four male members.
The team is led by Sharon Shea, who lives in Wenham with her husband, a son, a dog and a sense of humor. She is a breast cancer survivor who found that laughing about her circumstances with close friends and family was the best way to endure them.
"I think that always heals what hurts you," she says.
When she took a camping trip during the course of her treatment, she couldn't help but laugh when the mosquitoes didn't bite. They used to love her.
"That was one plus for radiation," she quips.
Shea's story begins in April 2005 with the diagnosis of breast cancer following a routine mammogram. The doctors recommended an immediate lumpectomy and 33 treatments of radiation. She was 43, younger than the typical breast cancer patient.
Then the hard part came.
She chose to be tested for a genetic mutation, known as BRCA1 and 2, that would make her more likely to develop another, more aggressive, cancer down the road. As part of the protocol, a patient must schedule an appointment to hear the test results face-to-face. Shea told her husband not to bother missing another day of work, as she was sure the news would be good. He came anyway.
The results were positive — and that started "a whole other mess." While not all women who inherit the gene will develop cancer, doctors told Shea that a woman with breast cancer who tests positive has as high as an 87 percent risk for developing a second breast cancer. Her chances of developing ovarian cancer were 10 times higher than the average woman.
Shea knew more than anything she didn't want to put life on hold worrying about her lousy odds. She opted for a pre-emptive strike. In December 2005, she underwent an oophorectomy to remove her ovaries and Fallopian tubes. Three months later, she had a double mastectomy. Reconstruction surgery came that following December.
"I didn't want to wait for the ball to drop," she says.
A few years before her breast cancer, Shea lost her mother to pancreatic cancer. It was quick. She was 71. "What she went through was so much worse." Her dad, she says, died a year and a half later from a broken heart.
That's the thing about cancer: Everybody knows somebody. Last year, there were 559,000 cancer deaths in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society. This year, I lost a favorite aunt to cancer, and there's an emptiness in my life far more painful than I had expected.
We all have someone we miss.
About 5,000 people participate in the North Shore Medical Center Cancer Walk in Salem each year, a powerful testament to how many lives are touched by this disease. Some teams walk in memory. Some walk for those still battling. But plenty of survivors walk, too. Last year, the Cleavage Club raised $5,300 for the cancer center, a place where Shea says she received "phenomenal" care and compassion.
"You walk into the cancer center with so much anxiety, and you come out thinking, 'I can really do this,"' she says. "These people become your friends."
As for the future, Shea feels hopeful. She is three years cancer-free and feels like herself again, only stronger. There are some bright sides to all of this. She jokes that her husband and son, now 20, finally discovered how to do laundry.
Shea will continue to get annual MRIs and blood tests twice a year to check for cervical cancer. There is always a pit in the stomach before the results come back.
"A friend joked that I had a black cloud hanging over my head," she says. "Now I feel like it's been blown out to sea."
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Staff writer Susan Flynn can be reached at 978-338-2658 or by e-mail at sflynn@salemnews.com
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