My wife, who has had multiple sclerosis (MS) for 30 of our 33 years of marriage, has faced more than her fair share of medical problems. In the fall of 1994, she found a lump on her breast. Because her breasts are very fibrous, mammograms are always a challenge, but the tests showed that it was indeed cancer.

    Her surgeon was very concerned about the additional risks that her MS would pose during the surgery and consulted with other doctors in the Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital network on how best to proceed.  In the end it was as uneventful as breast cancer surgery could be, and my wife needed only follow-up radiation treatment.

     She was concerned that the cancer may have spread and worried about how it might affect her life expectancy. Her oncologist, however, recommended she talk about this with her neurologist, as he felt that her MS might have a greater effect than the cancer she had just had.

    Life went on normally for us for a couple of years, until her family physician found a lump on her other breast. Again, her fibrous breasts posed a problem for the mammogram.

    The day after her mammogram we got a call from the doctor’s nurse. She told my wife that the report said she was okay. We breathed a sigh of relief. But at about 6:30 that night, the doctor phoned. She was not okay; she had cancer again.

    It was a long night. My poor wife was plagued by guilt. Maybe she got cancer because she didn’t have kids at a young enough age. Maybe it was from not eating the right kinds of food. You name the guilt trip, she experienced it that night.

    When we met with doctor, he told us to call him by his given name, Joe Bob (he’s from Texas). We asked him why he and the nurse had told us different things about the test results. Joe Bob replied, “A normal mammogram is one or two pages long. Yours had so many pages that if I threw it down my stairs at home there would be at least one page per stair. When a radiologist writes that much, it means he saw something but he’s not sure what it is. He writes that much to cover himself.”

    Based upon that we again embarked upon breast cancer surgery. I told my wife that she didn’t have to get cancer again; we could afford a boob reconstruction instead. The surgery went smoothly, except that while fixing chicken for supper, I cut the tip of my little finger off and had to go to the doctor to get it taken care of. We were the odd couple for a while!

    Although my wife didn’t need chemo for her cancer, one of the treatments done to fight her MS involved a type of chemo. She had only six treatments, one per quarter, but she now has a small heart murmur. The doctors believe the chemo caused it. Fortunately it’s so slight that it just needs to be watched.

    All in all, I would rather that we had never had to face either cancer surgery. But when I compare the surgeries to watching MS rob my wife of her mobility over the years, I see the cancer as just an event in our lives. After five years my wife was declared cancer free, and we celebrated that news. The MS, on the other hand, is ongoing.

    Our marriage is stronger because of the cancer and the MS. But even so, I would still like to be able to take a walk to the end of the street without getting the wheelchair out. I know some of you might think that cancer is a death sentence, but it’s not. It’s just another bump in the road of life.