Maintainer's note

This site isn't about me. I will probably write the majority of entries in this blog, and I will be responsible for organizing the content growing here, but I see myself as just the maintainer. This site is for my best friend and her battle with breast cancer. The whole point of this site is so that it can serve as a reservoir of information as she, with her entire support network, fights her cancer. Hopefully many many others who none of us will likely ever meet in person will join in their own ways as well. I know that every year multitudes of women and men, including personal friends and family, are diagnosed with varying stages of cancer, but selfishly, for the moment, my focus is only on this one individual and what is to come.

I hope to organize the plethora of information freely available on the Internet into something intelligible and truly useful to her. I'm certain that for every opinion espoused with supporting research I'll be able to find the exact opposite opinion with just as much supporting research. I'm actually quite optimistic for a successful outcome. So much energy has been dedicated to defeating this specific type of cancer. A 2015-2016 report from cancer.org shows that depending on what stage the tumor was discovered, 5-year survivorship rates for Chinese individuals can be as high as 93%! I'm not looking at the 5 year plan though, or the 10, or the 15. If she were to survive only 15 more years and then pass away, she would have passed at 56, leaving behind her husband, a 20 year old daughter, and an 18 year old son. She recently expressed to me that she hopes she can make it to her son's 18th birthday, that that might be enough. I want to see her to her 30th year PC (post-cancer), and then some. I'm encouraged that in the last few days, I have found, and I have been shared, stories of people who have successfully fought off breast cancer and continue to live to a ripe old age. May that be her outcome as well.

My bff does not know that I am putting this site together, but I have no doubt that I am not sharing any facets of her life to the readers that she would want kept private. When it has reached some level of readiness I will share it with her unless she discovers it on her own before then. It might be that she will need a pick me up in a moment when she is feeling especially tired and despondent, and then I hope to show her that there are far more people supporting her than she realized. Really, though, I hope that this will serve both as an emotional pick-me-up and as a tool to give her the best chance to do the right things to optimize both the quantity and quality of her life PC. Before wrapping up this note, I wanted to share the earliest moments of how we came to be where we are.

On Thursday, June 15, 2007, J told me that she had found a lump in her right breast. It wasn't discovered during her previous checkup several months prior, yet there it was now, and it made her arm feel weird. A few days later she was able to get an ultrasound which revealed an irregularly-shaped lump, so they took a biopsy. On Wednesday, June 21, they confirmed that it was cancerous. Officially, they labeled it as an invasive ductal tumor. Of those three words, the one that scared her most was invasive. I've since learned that all together, this phrase of medical jargon simply means that it is cancer, and this is the most common type of breast cancer.

I had gotten to work not thirty minutes before I received her phone call because I had not yet seen the gchat message she sent me. For posterity's sake, I've captured those moments here.

From my lens, these were the first shots fired of the battles to come - shocking and scary with so many unknowns. One of J's favorite sayings is, "Hope for the best, and prepare for the worst." Never have those words held more gravitas to me. It is frightening to look forward and deal with this hydra, but I think that J is in the best place she can be for the care that she will need. With her home base at Kaiser, she is surrounded by her coworkers and friends in the medical profession, and Stanford Medical Center and UCSF are each just an hour's drive away. I have to believe that she will have access to the best care possible for as long as she needs it.