Mother, grandmother, librarian, military spouse, family life educator, take your pick! Debbie Legault was born in British Columbia, Canada to a former RCAF airman father and a Scottish War Bride mother and has lived in other Canadian provinces, Germany and California. Her latest role is as the author of “Mom...It's Cancer”, the story of supporting her 27-year-old daughter as they experienced breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Debbie Legault

When my daughter Adrienne was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was living in a one-bedroom walkout basement apartment. Her landlords lived upstairs, and they were amazing people, so when I asked them if it would be possible for us to claim a corner of the backyard outside Adrienne’s door for me to put a couple of chairs and a table for us to sit on while I was living with her during treatment, they said “Of course.” Little did I know how important that decision would become.

Adrienne’s 20 weeks of chemotherapy started on May 29, right at the start of summer. Adrienne lives for the summer months: the clothes, the outdoor patios, floating on a lake. So many of the things she loves to do were not possible during treatment either because she wasn’t feeling up to it or there was the constant fear of being exposed to something that for her would spell disaster. And after she ended up with a fever and a rushed trip to emergency, the choice was made to keep close to home until chemo was done.

Treatment was always in the morning, so we would get up early and organize ourselves for however long we were going to be there. Side effects from the first chemo, “The Red Devil,” were very difficult to manage, which we quickly learned after her first time in the chair. But there would be a few golden hours, when the premedication was still in her system and the chemo hadn’t hit its peak, that she would feel fairly close to normal. And so a ritual was born.

When we got home from the hospital, I would set up the chairs and the table and we would grab a snack tray of whatever appealed at the moment and sit outside for a couple of hours. We would watch the squirrels and birds fighting over territory and sometimes see the neighborhood bunnies come to munch on the patches of green goodness they found in the yard. We would talk about whatever came to mind or laugh about something funny we had seen during the day. If a parcel had come that week, we saved it to open during these interludes in the summer sun and we shared the joy that came with each little gift unwrapped.

Debbie and Adrienne enjoying the sun. Photo courtesy of Debbie Legault.

As we sat there, I could see the darkness coming, her body start to sag as the side effects began to take hold. She would hang on as long as she could and when it was time, we would head into the house. Without a word I would tuck her into her spot on the couch, and then I would go outside and pack up our little oasis until the next time.

When I think back to that summer, I know that those shining moments with her were a gift to both of us. There isn’t a lot of joy to remember. For the most part those months were full of pain and misery, of me screaming at the top of my lungs inside my head at the unfairness of my child having to go through what she did. My mind is crowded with memories of me desperately trying to do all I could to make things just a little bit easier as Adrienne endured the worst trial of her life. The ritual of grabbing hold of those golden hours with all our might is a little sparkly gem that I can bring out and marvel at when I feel the sadness trying to suck me in. And every time I do, it makes me smile.

If you have joined this club that no one wants to be in, I encourage you to find that one spot where you, too, can create a ritual that in the future will bring you joy. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you. It will give you a moment to look back on when cancer didn’t take over, when you could do something that gave you a brief respite from the experience. It might be reading a book in a cozy corner or parking the car at a scenic spot and staring out the window at the wonders around you. This isn’t a “think positive” moment, because I spend my life as far away from toxic positivity as I can get. It’s a little bit of time out of time. And in the cancer-verse, we can all use that.

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A caregiver explains how she and her daughter soaked up as much joy as possible during the few hours her daughter felt close to normal after breast cancer treatment.

Summer Breeze

One of the phrases used by many people during the pandemic to describe young people is that they feel invincible, that their youthful confidence gives them a sense that COVID-19 is something only other people get. As we now know that confidence has turned out to be more like blissful ignorance, because the virus has hit younger people hard in the last wave.

That same blissful ignorance of the fact that young women get breast cancer made my daughter, Adrienne, brush off her concern when she first felt the lump during a shower check in November of 2018. After all, she was 27, and although one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during their lifetime, she had never heard or seen any stories of cases from women in their 20s. As time passed, however, the lump not only remained but grew bigger, and Adrienne decided it was something that needed to be checked out. In February of 2019 she went to her doctor to express her concerns.

Adrienne’s doctor is in her 50s and has been practicing medicine for over 20 years in a large city. She is respectful of my daughter’s body awareness and when Adrienne said there was a lump, she asked her to get into a gown so she could do an exam. Her dismissal of Adrienne’s original concern was evident in her face when she felt what Adrienne had felt in the shower, and with surprise on her face and in her tone, she said, “Oh, that’s definitely a lump.” And in the next sentence she began to list off all the things it could be that weren’t cancer.

Next step was an ultrasound. The ultrasound technician was also in her 50s and got the same surprised look on her face when she saw the spot in the images that appeared on her screen. As she was taking measurements, she began talking to Adrienne about all the possible benign things the lump could be.Adrienne walked out of that appointment knowing the lump in her breast had been confirmed but confident that it wasn’t anything she needed to be worried about.

Based on the ultrasound results, Adrienne’s doctor referred her to a surgeon who ordered a biopsy. The technician froze the area and guided by ultrasound, inserted the needle into Adrienne’s breast to take a sample as they had a conversation about all the benign possibilities. When the biopsy needle encountered something solid, the technician eliminated a cyst as an option but spoke at length about fibroadenomas, which are a solid benign mass found in women’s breasts. It was only after this appointment that Adrienne looped me in about what was going on, I think because her 100% certainty that it was not cancer dropped to 99% when the biopsy needle didn’t poke into a sac of fluid.

When Adrienne walked into the surgeon’s office, she carried with her youthful confidence in her invincibility, that blissful ignorance reinforced by the fact that all the medical professionals she had dealt with up to then had spoken to her about all the possible reasons for the lump other than the worst-case scenario.

So, when the surgeon looked at her and said that it was a “little bit of cancer,” her shock was magnified a hundredfold. He gently shared with her what the next steps would be, and as Adrienne left his office, his receptionist asked if she could give her a hug. Both of these people are in their 50s and had never seen a case of a woman in her 20s with breast cancer.

Many people ask me how Adrienne found out she had cancer, and I tell them she found the lump in a shower self-exam and made the choice to check it out. Because she made that choice, despite everything she “knew” about breast cancer, it was caught early enough that it had only metastasized to her lymph nodes. This is not the situation in too many cases. Younger women who have breast cancer may ignore the warning signs—such as a breast lump or unusual discharge—because they believe they are too young to get breast cancer. This can lead to a delay in diagnosis and poorer outcomes. And some healthcare providers may also dismiss breast lumps or other symptoms in young women or adopt a "wait and see" approach.

I will be forever grateful to Adrienne’s doctor that she opted to investigate right away. And I think her doctor, her ultrasound and biopsy technicians (who were part of her surgical prep team) and her surgeon owe her a debt of gratitude, as well. Now, when a 20-something woman comes into their sphere they no longer live in blissful ignorance that it can’t be breast cancer, because they met my daughter. I hope that her diagnosis is being shared with the young women they know and that by bursting that innocence bubble my child having had cancer may save lives.

A mother describes how her daughter discovered a lump that led to a breast cancer diagnosis.

My Daughter, the Learning Opportunity

When my daughter, Adrienne, and I went to chemotherapy teaching, they were very clear about the importance of us understanding the threat of even a minor infection when the chemotherapy drugs took out her immune system as they were attacking her cancer. We were given a special card to show to emergency room staff to make sure that if she presented with a fever, we would be fast-tracked into a treatment area because time is of the essence. Like many patients undergoing cancer treatment, we decided that it was better to be safe than sorry and began to live pretty much in isolation, only leaving the house when it was necessary to buy food or go to an appointment.

An outcome of that choice was that going to the oncology clinic for chemotherapy was one of the few times that we went out, so on treatment days as long as she felt up to it, we would dress up to go to the hospital, Adrienne matching her head coverings to outfits and jewelry, and me putting together a casual “going out for lunch with friends” ensemble and fixing my hair just so. We both knew that if we felt good on the outside, it boosted what was going on with our insides. And sometimes our insides were a pretty desperate affair, so it made a huge difference walking in for her to get hooked up to the IV knowing we were put together head to toe.

And once she was in the chair, the nurses on the oncology ward became our social network. They were the only group of people in our lives who didn’t look at her like a patient with cancer. We asked what they had done on the weekend and they shared stories of standing in water, fishing, laughing about the big one that got away. Sometimes Adrienne would bake for them, and if one of the nurses had not been there when the brownies were devoured, she’d tease my girl about making sure something came in with her name on it the next time.

There was one nurse who was two weeks older than Adrienne who was entering into a new relationship and the two of them would giggle about something the new guy had done or said. They all called me “Mom” instead of Mrs. Legault, because they could see that being Adrienne’s mom was the most important thing in my life at that moment in time. And when that last bag finished dripping into Adrienne’s arm, two of them hugged both of us with the joy that came with knowing she had made it through, despite the aggressive treatment. She had toughed out the side effects and completed the grueling regimen that gave her the best shot at success.

Choosing a career in a profession like oncology takes a very special type of person, because they are working with people who are dealing with one of the worst times in their lives every single day. The group of nurses that treated my daughter were magical unicorns to me. They weren’t falsely cheerful. They were human beings sharing my child’s trauma, understanding how her body had betrayed her and doing all they could to make her feel like just a girl, not a girl with cancer. Week after week, they made it possible for me to sit in that chair and not scream at the top of my lungs as they infused what felt like poison into Adrienne’s veins.

I will be eternally grateful to them for making those 20 weeks bearable. They will never know how much their presence meant or how I could never have done it without them. I thanked them, of course, but no words that I could ever say would be enough.

A caregiver describes the imprint her daughter’s oncology nurses left on her heart.

A Very Special Social Network of Oncology Nurses

When I Google “Adult Children with Cancer,” the fourth result on the list is an article I wrote for CURE® in September 2020.While I acknowledge that it is kind of cool to see something I created in the first few search results, the bigger part of that picture for me is that if my essay is that high up on the list, that tells me that there simply aren’t a lot of resources out there for people like me – mothers of young women with cancer.

Just like there weren’t a lot of resources for me two years ago when my 27-year-old daughter told me the news of her diagnosis.

I was recently contacted by a mother whose 20-something son had been diagnosed with cancer and she was having the same challenges finding material related to her situation.She found my article on Google, too, and based on my essay, she reached out to ask me if I had any tips to help her be who her son needed her to be as he went through treatment.

I read the same helplessness in her words, the same disbelief, the same shock I felt when I was trying to process what had just happened in my child’s life and mine.My heart went out to her because I had a pretty good idea of how she was going to feel watching her son experience cancer treatment, how she would wish she could somehow wave a magic wand and make it all go away for both of them.

A few months ago, I got a message from a young woman telling me that the book I wrote talking about my experience had been of great help to her mother in understanding not only her own raw emotions but also some hard truths about cancer treatment and the moments of hilarity that aren’t really part of the public perception. I answered back that the reason I wrote about my time supporting my daughter through cancer treatment was that I wanted one mother, just one, to look for a resource out there that was specific to her situation and find one. Mission accomplished, I guess.

I don’t know why we are so invisible. Perhaps it’s because there is the expectation that we will pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and move on despite the despair. Or maybe it’s because we are so used to mothers holding barf buckets and wiping brows without flinching that we just assume that watching a child go through cancer treatment is just one step along the same path.

Let me tell you, it’s not. It’s more like Godzilla swung his tail and knocked you clear into an abyss and you’re dangling there, your nails digging into the cliff, holding on for dear life, trying very hard not to look down at what might be below.

I wish I could have found a community in the cancer world that made sense for me, but I didn’t. Even now the people I interact with as I continue to write about my experience are not like me. Most of them have had cancer or lost someone to this terrible disease and so while I am welcome on the periphery, I am still an outsider.

I have been told that I really understand what it’s like for young adults to go through cancer and that my daughter is lucky to have me in her corner. I am grateful for those words. What is missing in this equation for me is that I don’t seem to have anyone who understands what it is like to be a mother of a 27-year-old woman with cancer. Not a young child. Not a teenager. Those experiences have their own pain that I would never presume to understand.

Rather, I watched a young woman that I gave love, roots and wings to joyously spread her wings to fly only to have them cruelly clipped as she was soaring into her future.

I don’t think I have ever been so lonely in my entire life. And as I sit here the survivor’s guilt has climbed onto my shoulder and whispered in my ear “Well at least she’s still here.”

A mother describes how lonely she feels as the caregiver of an adult child with cancer.

Debbie Legault

Summer Breeze

My Daughter, the Learning Opportunity

A Very Special Social Network of Oncology Nurses

Not Finding a Community as a Caregiver

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