Chelsea's Story

Our story has been short, but filled with events even before we were a story. I met Matt through a mutual friend of ours. He was a widower at 30 with a 9 year old and 2 year old. After a year and half he decided to look into getting back into the game. So in stepped our friend and got us together via e-mail. After dating for a while, both Matt and I knew that we were going to be together. I sold my house and moved in with my parents before we had even dated 4 months.

Matt asked me to marry him on our 7th month anniversary and we set the date to be married 4 months later. We bought a house together and our new family moved in together for the 1st time. We knew that we were biting off a lot with buying a house, selling his house and all living under one roof, but we thought it would soon pass and the hard stuff would be past us. On Easter of 2008, I found a lump in my breast. I didn’t think too much about it seeing how I had found one 5 years before in the other and it turned out to be nothing. But I went ahead and went through the steps of going to doctors and surgeons and such. Matt went with me to the surgeon’s office for the biopsy on 4-3-08. We were planning on playing hooky the rest of the day to get some alone time. Little did we know what would be dropped on us that day.

The surgeon did the biopsy and put in a tag. She was talking that it might be cancer so I was a little freaked, but when she sat us in that big conference room with a brochure about breast cancer is when it really started to sink in. How could this be? I had just finally found my first love at age 35, was going to get married in a month and was going to be a step mom. How could I possibly have cancer?

We called my family and made arrangements for the girls to stay someplace that night so we could try to wrap our heads around this. We decided to tell the girls on that weekend. We were not sure how they would take it seeing how they had lost their mom just a little over 2 years before due to heart complications. They were stronger than we thought. We think that God put us together since they were a strong family and could deal with helping me through this ordeal with what they had already been through.

Matt and I decided to go ahead and keep our original wedding date even with everything going on. We wanted to keep as much normal as we could seeing that everything seemed to be spinning out of normal range. We were hoping that I would keep my hair for the wedding, but one week before it started coming out. So we made a family night of cutting my hair. I had bought a wig just in case and so I had my wedding hair. So on May 9th 2008 we were married. We decided to post-pone our honeymoon until I was feeling better and would be able to enjoy it more. Plus I would like to have hair for my honeymoon pictures.

Things have been hard enough being newlyweds, but not having any sense of normalcy on top of it make it that much worse. We keep thinking just a few more months. I will be done with chemo in August and between now and then we have to decide what kind of surgery we want to do. Which that alone is a whole other issue. We have decided that making it through our first year of marriage will be more than some people go through in 20 years. We already had the deck stacked just with dealing with merging me into the family and getting the girls to accept me as their step mom. But putting cancer on top of that put a whole other layer on our cake.

Matt and I are trying as best we can to keep our minds clear and not let the cancer get us down. It is hard seeing how we only had the first 3 weeks of living under the same roof before cancer crept in. So trying to keep in mind that what we are going through is not what it will be like for the rest of our lives is difficult to remember. But we have good weeks and bad like everybody. We are just hoping to get through our first year without too many scars from the battles.