this is not how i'm trying to roll.

It’s been a rough two weeks filled with delayed freelancing money, a lot of bickering at home, and a virus-infected computer.

To put it plainly, this Slayer has been stressed. And that isn’t a good thing.

I am a true believer in the mind-body connection, so after I was diagnosed, I made a promise to myself to live a tranquil and peaceful existence. In my world, stress-induced cancer recurrences are real. Two years ago, I experienced one first-hand.

Well, it wasn’t really an occurrence but rather some dormant cancer cells that I believe were triggered into action when my mom was hospitalized.

In 2008, I was finishing up what was supposed to have been my last chemo treatment. When the nurse unplugged me, I was so happy that the entire experience was over that I actually burst into tears. For several weeks prior, my family had been planning a big celebration. And I spent a lot of time congratulating myself on making it through. No more chemo, no more needles, no more planning my life around cancer — or so I believed.

My last session ended on a Thursday. That Friday, my mom was admitted to the intensive care unit at a hospital in Delaware. Needless to say, I headed down there to take care of her. I spent all of my time traveling to and from the hospital, talking to doctors and specialists, and helping moms get through physical rehab.

After a month or so, my mom got better, but then my doctors found some leftover cancer in my abdomen that flared up. There’s little doubt in my mind that  it was stress related. I had literally worried myself sick and, as a result, had to resume chemo treatments.

Since then, I’ve adopted an anti-stress regime to prevent it from happening again. It includes yoga, regular deep breathing, and a bottle of gin.

Unfortunately, none of my go-to remedies have been much help over the last two weeks. My morning yoga sessions leave me feeling relaxed until I check my e-mail, which is about every 10 minutes or so. I’ve been having a virtual battle over e-mail recently with one of my employers about contract delays, glitches in the matrix, and invoices. It seem they couldn’t care less that I have bills to pay.

The constant drama has turned my deep breathing into sighs of frustration, and that bottle of gin I mentioned. Well, it’s got a swig or two left, but I don’t have the cash to re-up.  Actually, I’ve traded in the booze for green tea, which is a much healthier tonic.

Unfortunately, though, it looks like that stress factor of the last two weeks really has taken its toll. I just received the lab results from my chemo session yesterday, and my CA-125, a blood test that measures cancer in the body, jumped from 87 to 154. Normal is 35 or below.

Until this week, my numbers had been on a nice downward trend, decreasing slowly but surely. And just that quickly they shot up. After making good progress, today I’m feeling like I’ve been running a steady race only to find out that the finish line got moved back a few miles.

But I’m keeping it all in perspective. Not too long ago, my numbers were in the thousands. And I’ve had small increases before. After the last little spike, my doctor, God bless her, told me straight up, “I’m not worried.”

I’m raising a cup of green tea in her honor and hoping that she says the same thing next week.

Felder, founder of the advocacy organization Tamika & Friends, has been working nonstop since the start of 2010 to raise awareness about cervical cancer.

Tamika Felder (left) speaking at one of her foundation-sponsored events.

Her main messages: cervical cancer is preventable and it is not a result of promiscuous sexual behavior.

When Felder was diagnosed nine years ago, there was little information about cervical cancer and even fewer resources. She’s been on a mission to change that ever since, sharing information about necessary screenings and preventive practices.

That involves two tests that have proven highly effective in combating the disease: the Pap test, which checks for changes in the cells of the cervix before cancer develops, and the HPV test, which is used to detect the presence of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, the sexually transmitted virus that is the primary cause of cervical cancer.

There are more than 100 types of HPV, and 30 or so are spread through sexual contact, including oral sex. It’s so common that nearly all sexually active adults will become infected with some form of the virus during their lives, but most will never know it because it usually clears up on its own.

“We are all exposed to HPV at some point,” says Felder. “Some of us just don’t have the immune systems to fight it off.”

Within the last 30 years alone, the number of cervical cancer deaths has declined by 74 percent due to increased use of the Pap test. And in recent years, the vaccine Gardasil has proven successful in preventing HPV in young women who have not been exposed to the virus, although it has seen it’s fair share of controversy since hitting the market, mostly because of reported adverse side effects.

Yet, despite the advances, about 11,000 women will be diagnosed with the disease this year, and about 4,000 will die. Early screening and detection is crucial, particularly for sexually active women between the ages of 20-24, the population most likely to be infected. The American Cancer society recommends that women begin regular cervical cancer screenings about three years after they become sexually active.

“Most women with cervical cancer don’t show symptoms,” says Dr. Beverly London, a GYN in Jacksonville, Fla. “Some have bleeding after sex or a bloody or watery discharge, but it’s a pretty asymptomatic disease. It’s a slow-growing disease that is highly treatable when a woman gets a Pap test regularly.”

That’s information that Felder passes along to the thousands of women she meets as part of her cervical cancer campaign. It’s also information she wishes she’d been armed with when she was in her twenties.

Felder, who had no symptoms, originally scheduled an appointment to see her doctor for a boil under her arm. While she was there, the doctor recommended that she have a Pap test. It had been years since she’d gotten one, she admits, “for two reasons: I didn’t have insurance, and I had body-image issues.”

Two weeks later, when the results of her test came back, Felder was told she had advanced cervical cancer. Not long after her diagnosis, she underwent a radical hysterectomy to remove the tumors, followed by eight rounds of chemo and 16 rounds of radiation treatment.

“I thought I’d leave the appointment with the doctor telling me I needed to lose weight, not that I had cancer,” she says.

Scared and in shock, Felder says she remembered another friend, Catherine Tyler, who had a similar story.

Tyler, a marketing manger for AT&T, had been diagnosed in 1994, at the age of 25. At the time, she was a senior in college, was in a monogamous relationship, and she’d just been accepted to grad school. When she went to see her doctor after suffering pelvic pain and irregular periods for several months, she thought she might be pregnant. Like Felder, it had been years since she had seen a GYN and had a Pap test, but she considered herself pretty healthy.

“My mother wouldn’t take me to the doctor for a Pap or for birth control pills, only because she was old-school,” says Tyler. “She felt that if I wasn’t having sex, then I didn’t need a Pap smear because it was invasive. And if I was having sex, she wasn’t going to get me birth control pills because she saw it as a license to have sex.”

Tyler was in fact pregnant with her daughter, Sydney, who is now 16, but she was also diagnosed with cervical cancer.

After seeing a family oncologist, she had a partial hysterectomy and immediately started chemo and then radiation. It was a difficult regimen, she says, but she was determined not to put her life’s plans on hold. After giving birth, she attended grad school, baby in tow, and continued her treatments while she studied. She also began talking to young women about the disease, including her daughter.

Catherine Tyler and daughter Sydney

“I think about girls like me, girls whose parents never talked to them about sex and yearly exams,” Tyler concludes. “I didn’t know any better. I tell my daughter and the other girls I talk to that anyone can get HPV. I wasn’t having sex in high school, and I don’t want them to think this disease comes from being promiscuous. There’s no education around it, which means there will be more cases. There are too many 21- and 22-year-olds with the virus. More education will lead to lower numbers. We’ve got to get the word out.”

For more information on cervical cancer, go to TamikaandFriends.org.

]]> http://cancerslayergyrl.com/2010/02/24/combating-the-stigma-of-cervical-cancer/feed/ 5 garciagyrl tamika Tyler and daughter http://cancerslayergyrl.com/2010/02/12/a-woman-of-power/ http://cancerslayergyrl.com/2010/02/12/a-woman-of-power/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:10:39 +0000 garciagyrl http://cancerslayergyrl.com/?p=1397 ]]> I forgot about how important it is to be around progressive people who are doing big things.

For the last three days, I’ve been in La Quinta, California, at the Women of Power Summit, where more than 500 fabulous females have convened to talk about everything from courage to confidence.

Yesterday was my turn to take the stage — literally.

I moderated a panel session called “The Truth About Black Women and Our Health.” How apropos. At first, I was nervous about being in front of a room full of powerful women, having to remember names and bios in addition to all my questions. But I shouldn’t have worried. My topic wasn’t as sexy as “What is Your Next Act,” which was taking place next door, so my room was only about half full.

Initially, I was sort of relieved. Fewer people in the room meant fewer folks to embarrass myself in front of. But to my surprise, my session turned out to be far more intimate than I imagined. And once I got started, everything flowed quite nicely. My panel, which included Dr. Andrea Pennington, Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, and Dr. Jennifer Jones, was awesome. So were member of the audience. They were engaged (lots of amens), and they asked really thoughtful questions. We talked about alternative medicines for those with chronic illnesses such as cancer, women and alcohol consumption (no more than two drinks a week, but don’t tell anyone that I broke that rule last night), and the significance of knowing your family history.

About midway through, I was feeling myself, wondering why more people hadn’t attended “my session.” I was interjecting when needed, adding tidbits about my cancer journey here and there, and the more I shared my story, the more that nervousness melted away. When the session ended, I was feeling triumphant, like I pulled off something big. A couple of women even came up to me afterward and hugged me. Not bad for a first-time moderator. I have to admit that I was beginning to feel, well, powerful.

That’s the magic of powwowing with like-minded women and the secret behind the success of WPS.

Since it started five years ago, the summit has managed to attract some big-names folks — Susan Taylor, B. Smith, Jill Scott — but I found myself most inspired by the other attendees. And when that happens, something intangible, possibly even indescribable, unfolds. You find, as author Lisa Nichols put it, “a new someone to share the journey with.”

In my case, I found a few hundred someones. Yes, yes.