Veta's Story

A little over seven years ago, I had just started the most challenging job I ever held as a city group manager over three branch offices for a staffing company. I was responsible for the Longview, Nacogdoches and Tyler operations, sales, customer service, risk management, and the hiring, recruiting, training and safety of approximately 500 field and about ten office employees.

Walking into the office was a real challenge because the former group manager who was a close friend to me had been transferred to Virginia and the position that I assumed had been vacant for about three months. A lot of customers were lost in that timeframe including a few national accounts. Anyway, to make a long story short, I was well into my learning curve and accomplishing a lot of things to get the group of three branch offices back in the green.

And because of my hectic schedule, I called to cancel my annual physical for a scheduled mammogram. My physician at that time was a wonderful young female doctor whom I still admire greatly. When I called her office to reschedule my appointment, her nurse got on the phone and encouraged me to keep my scheduled appointment because I would have had to wait about another three to four months to get a different appointment. I told her how very busy I was at the time and she encouraged me to keep that appointment.

The day I went for my mammogram will forever live in my memory. I had found a lump in one breast which I was concerned about. The technician took the films, and after a very long time, she came back and said they needed to re-film one of my breasts. I said “oh no, it is something in my left breast.” She stated “that one is okay, you just still have the fibracystic breast disease in that one.” The doctor wanted to check the right one again. So we went through the “pancake compression” process again. I waited for about 20 minutes and she came back and said the doctor wanted her to retake the film again. So here we went all over again. The technician said “I hate to hurt you, but I have to really flatten this and get a good picture for the doctor.” I told her to do whatever they needed to do and I gritted my teeth.

I waited again for what seemed an eternity. Then the technician came into the room and said “Mrs. Weaver, the doctor wants to see you.” I felt as though I were walking to my execution going down that long hallway. When we arrived in the room, the female physician just simply told me that she was not going to sugar coat it, but she had found something of great concern. She showed me on the film up on the wall and she said she needed to do a sonogram and try to pinpoint the exact location. I shall always remember how she, the nurse and I just sort of joked through the entire process and I even told her at one point that I certainly wanted to save both breasts in case I ever decided to be a topless dancer. I was of course just kidding, but the doctor said “yes we always should keep all our options open.”

After this process, I was then scheduled to see a surgeon who scheduled the surgery and I had to have a needle biopsy just before the surgery. They actually rolled me from the hospital into the breast clinic, inserted the needle into the exact place, then rolled me back to the surgery area for the removal of the lump.

It was a really easy process and since one of my sisters had a benign lump removed, and my mother also had a benign lump removed several years before that, I just was absolutely not concerned.

After the removal of the lump, I went back to work and on the day for my follow up appointment, I was in the Tyler office alone. I had sent two of my office managers to a training session in Austin and had one open position and I was trying to man all three offices alone. We had the capability to forward phones from one office or several offices to another and we could work within each location’s data on the computers since they were all networked together.

I went for my appointment and remember that the nurse came out in the waiting room to ask me if I had brought anyone with me. It just never dawned on me that I should have brought someone with me. Finally, the nurse called me into the doctor’s office and the surgeon began to tell me that I had a “Non-invasive carcinoma.” In other words, he was saying, it was malignant. I just sort of went into shock, but I felt like I had left my body and was listening to someone ask questions (me) about what should we do now.

After going through all the details of my options which included another surgery to remove a much larger area where the lump had been removed already, or a mastectomy, or a mastectomy and reconstruction, I pulled myself together and asked “Which procedure will allow me to live the longest?” My surgeon stated to me that anytime you do the mastectomy, there was a greater chance of living longer without it returning. I told him “Then there is no decision. Let’s remove it.”

I went back to my office and could not call anyone because I knew I could not allow myself to discuss this over the phone. Miraculously, the phones that had been ringing off the wall for days just stopped ringing. After about 30 minutes, my surgeon’s nurse called me and she advised me that the doctor was worried about me because I had appeared to go into shock. She said “Do you understand what he told you and that you are so very lucky?” I then broke down and sobbed for a while with the nurse gently talking me through this over the phone. After a while I calmed down and said, “I am not the first woman that this happened to, and I won’t be the last.”

Later that day when I returned home, my husband was in the kitchen and he was talking a mile a minute and I thought he would never stop. Finally I told him that I needed to talk with him. And he looked at me and said “It was cancer wasn’t it?” and I broke down again.

After the surgeon scheduled me to go see a radiologist, a cancer doctor, and a plastic surgeon, I tried to decide who to take with me. My husband and I discussed it at length and I decided to take my only daughter. Upon hearing the details of my options from the various physicians, I made my decision with the encouragement and support of my daughter.

Because my cancer was contained and had not traveled outside the walls of one gland, and since it was about the size of a pencil eraser, I did not have to have radiation or chemotherapy by choosing the mastectomy option. My reconstruction was difficult for me, but I am so glad that I selected that option. I never saw myself without a breast.

I believe that my recovery was easier than most because I had a very supportive husband, family, my daughter was there for me every minute, and my neighbors and friends were there for me. And my employer had wonderful medical insurance coverage, I had a nice cancer coverage policy, and my medical insurance paid for a home health care nurse to come to my house to assist with bandages etc for weeks. And since I had taken out the extra disability insurance on my job, I received 100% of my paycheck for approximately three months that I was off.

Now I say I was off, however, since I was the manager with a huge responsibility, my husband drove me regularly several times a week to one of my offices to hold a staff meeting and make sure that things were going well. He would help me into the car and out of the car and then come back to get me later. Not many women are as lucky as I was. And the young man that had breast cancer at the same time that I did was not so lucky. My surgeon told me that young man was not going to survive.

I talked with my two sons and told them how they could be just as vulnerable as their sister in getting breast cancer. My youngest son laughed and joked with me about it, but I hope that all three of my children know what a great risk factor they have. Men should examine themselves regularly as well because they can get breast cancer too.

When I was diagnosed, I had sisters, friends, cousins, and numerous relatives that all rushed in for mammograms. Many of them had never had a mammogram. No one in my mother’s side of the family had ever had breast cancer. I am the only one in the entire Johnson family to get breast cancer. Since my cancer, one of my cousin’s wives has had breast cancer and she is not a blood relative of the Johnson family. My father’s mother had died from double breast cancer when I was a child. Surprised? Not nearly as much as my family was. The physicians even raised eyebrows over this one.

Given the circumstances leading up to my diagnosis, I just feel so very blessed. God had a mission for me and I may never know exactly what that mission was or is, but God knows. I am a SURVIVOR!

October 19 is National Mammography Day. Don’t take a chance. The cost without insurance is probably less than maybe a hundred dollars. Don’t take a chance with your life. Go ahead and make that call. Do it for your children, your grandchildren, your spouse, and your elderly parents. But most of all, do it for YOU!