“I told her that I had a monster that had gotten inside of me, and we had to take some really hardcore medicine that was going to make me really sick but also kick that monster’s butt.”
That’s the way Kokomo resident Sarah Church broke the news of her breast cancer diagnosis earlier this year to her 5-year-old daughter.
It was mid-February when Church found out the news herself; invasive ductal carcinoma.
“There were no signs,” Church told the Tribune last week during a sit-down interview. “I felt healthy. I felt great. I knew nothing.”
And when she turned 40, Church went to get her mammogram based on recommended guidelines.
She didn’t think anything of it, she explained. It was just a routine screening.
“And so they said, ‘OK, if you don’t hear from us, you’ll get a letter in the mail telling you to come back next year,’” she recalled. “Then they told me that they’ll call me if they need to see me again right away.”
Two days later, Church received a voicemail from her gynecologist’s office.
They wanted her to have a second mammogram, which eventually prompted a biopsy.
“That’s when it came back that it was breast cancer,” she said. “The whole world dropped at that point. It was a shock. Cancer doesn’t run in our family, and it just didn’t occur to me that that’s what it could be.”
So suddenly, with the unknown at her doorstep, Church set off on the fight of her life.
But she wasn’t alone in that fight, she noted.
She had her husband, two kids and a community of family and friends by her side.
“If a person doesn’t have a support system, I don’t know how they do it,” Church said. “It was everything for me. My husband took on everything that I couldn’t do. My kids dealt with the fact that I couldn’t go out and play or couldn’t do certain things that I used to do. My friends and family just came over and cleaned my house or got me groceries when I was too sick to get up. If they weren’t there, I don’t think I could have done it.”
Along with a solid support system, a positive attitude also helped Church adjust to the cancer treatment.
“They told me that I had to do something called the ‘Red Devil’ chemo,” she said. “And all I could think about that first day was that they were going to pump poison into my body. I was struggling with that. I knew chemo was going to go in and kill a bunch of my healthy cells.
So I was sitting there and just thinking that into my brain,” Church added, “that they were pumping poison in me. It was a mind game. What I really needed to think in my mind was that they were actually pumping into me the medicine that would cure me.”
And once Church changed that mindset, she said the chemo treatments and current radiation — though not easy — was and still is tolerable.
These days, Church, who went into remission on July 3, said she’s counting her blessings and smelling the proverbial roses.
Because she knows now just how quickly life can change.
“I had my whole summer planned,” she said. “Summer is our favorite season, and I had all these plans laid out. It goes to show you that you never really know what’s going to happen, so you really do have to live for the day. Don’t waste your time being unhappy or not doing what you want to do. You have to live your life, really live.”
And get your mammograms, she added.
“It’s scary, I get it,” she said. “It’s that way because if there’s something wrong, it’s ‘I don’t want to know.’ But the thing is, that’s how you can catch it early enough. I found out I had it and got rid of it in a few months. If you wait, that’s when you might have a bigger fight. So go get your mammograms. They might just save your life.”
