Since I started my cancer crusade, I’ve been supported by a legion of caretakers — friends and family — who have helped this Slayer gyrl come back strong. I still have a long way to go, but the road to recovery is best traveled with a crew, and I have one of the dopest around.   

Case in point: My diagnosis, surgery, and chemo were a pretty crappy series of events. It’s like someone threw in all the ingredients of the worst things that can happen in life and served them to me straight up.  

A few days before my surgery, though, I’m at home, belly distended with about nine liters of fluid called acites, which  often forms around ovarian tumors. It was uncomfortable and, literally, killing me, but I wasn’t so much nervous about the events that were about to unfold as I was eager to get the damn surgery over and done with. As I was sitting around trying to get my mind right, who decides to come sauntering through my door at 9 p.m. from more than 3,000 miles away? My road dog and favorite cousin, ArtistCalida.  

a joint birthday celebration for the garcia gyrls

Now, Calida and I have been like hotdogs and applesauce since the beginning. Our dads are brothers, and we were born only two days apart. We lived around the corner from each other our entire childhoods, left our homes in Wilmington, Del., to go to different HBCUs, and then regrouped like long-lost twins in New York City, where we lived together (and got robbed, but that’s another story).  

After spending our twenties living it up in NYC, Calida made her way to the West Coast, where she now has a family of her own. So when she showed up at my apartment in Brooklyn in June of 2008, I was surprised to see her. But then again, it made all the sense in the world. With my cancer run-in, our twin energy was off, and Lida had to come back to restore it.  

So, fast-forward to a new and healthier me (y’all get the blog updates), and now I get to cheer from the sidelines. Lida just finished her first children’s book, Same Difference, which is a beautifully illustrated story about black hair, diversity, and two precocious little cousins who act more like twins. Sounds awfully familiar.  

joint toilet time -- one of the book's illustrations

Same Difference, which was published last month, has already gotten glowing reviews by Essence, and my cuz is doing  readings and visiting classrooms in Los Angeles to talk about her work. The book is less about me (and another one of our cousins who got morphed into the same character) and more about celebrating the beauty of diversity. Either way, I’m glad to have been along for the journey and to see the story of our sweet-as-pie childhood come to life in vivid colors and detail.     

Most of all, though, I’m feeling pretty proud to have served as one-half of my cousin’s inspiration, especially since she has often been the source of mine — like the night I shed my cancer cocoon and emerged a Cancer Slayer.  

When I first opened my eyes post-surgery, Lida was at my bedside. And when my doctors forced me to get up and walk around the very same day, she held my robe closed so I wouldn’t moon the hospital visitors who passed us by.   

She made me laugh even though I had staples in my stomach and helped me sneak sips of water when the doctors told me I could only have ice chips.   

There’s nothing like having a cousin there to help you bend the rules. And that’s how it’s been since we were little enough to share the same toilet seat — which really did happen.   

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 Continue reading →]]> 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.