Two Sisters ,Two Cancers ,Two Very Different Treatments

ONE SUNNY SATURDAY morning two years ago, my phone rang as I was walking out to my garden with my coffee and paper. It was my big sister, Karen, from California. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “I’ve just found out I have breast cancer.”

 

- Catherine Gordon

 Unfortunately, I didn’t have any trouble believing it. Not because of the statistics: about 26,000 Canadian women and over 260,000 women in the United States were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017. Or because Karen had already had cancer. The news didn’t surprise me because I have it, too.

Two sisters, two countries, two cancers. On the surface, our experiences were very similar: we both received excellent treatment, we had lots of support, and we’re recovering well. But there were some important differences.

MORE THAN HALF a million women around the world die of breast cancer every year, yet nobody knows for sure who will get it or why. Lots of environmental and lifestyle factors have been associated with higher risk: how much you exercise, what you eat, how much you weigh, how much alcohol you consume and whether you smoke or have had hormone replacement therapy. But the two most significant risk factors are simply being a woman and getting older.

Karen is 64, four years older than me. Her three children are grown, and she lives with her husband, John, in a small town outside Los Angeles. I live in Toronto and have children in their 20s, a new husband, Jim, and I run a communications business.

My sister survived a brain tumour when she was 37 and hasn’t worked since. But we’re both healthy and reasonably active. I have never smoked, and Karen stopped a few years ago. There’s no history of breast cancer in our family, and we’ve both tested negative for mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that produce tumour suppressor proteins.

Every year, my doctor would give me a requisition for a mammogram, and every year, I’d find it crumpled at the bottom of my bag several months later. I was always too busy. I hadn’t had one since my first at age 50.