Cancer Survivorship Changed My Body: One Day in a Factory Showed Me Just How Much

Summer Jobs and a Need for Extra Money

I worked in factories as a temporary employee when I was a teenager during the summer for extra money. I once worked at a soap factory. My job was to rinse bottles that had become soapy when they were overfilled on the assembly line. This was easy and made light work. Another time, I temped in a plastics factory where they fabricated trailer sinks. My job was to trim the drains of the sinks with a large X-Acto knife. At this factory, I almost cut my thumb off. This work was obviously more dangerous than the work at the soap factory, and I didn't care for it. A third job was picking and packing beauty products at a beauty supply company. I liked this job because I could move around the factory and read the labels on the products.

Recently, I did some work at a place where I had to tape up smallish boxes full of pens that were to be shipped to a chain of national banks. All day long I had to pull the handle of the large tape machine and apply the thick wet tape to box after box. Then a label had to be stuck to the box. During the eight-hour day, I must have processed hundreds of boxes.

I took the job because I needed money. I worked as a writing teacher during the school year, but in the summer, my funds ran low, especially since I'd recently bought a new Subaru, and my car payments were high.

The morning, which ran from 8:00 to 12:00, was fairly easy. My body was a little tired. At lunch, I climbed the stairs to the lunchroom and sat alone, eating a bag of pretzels and drinking Diet Dr Pepper from vending machines. I called my husband, who had every other Friday off from work. Currently, he was supervising workers who were remodeling our kitchen.

"How's it going?" I asked.

"OK," he replied. "They just came and did the countertop templating."

We were getting granite countertops. Our whole kitchen had been gutted, and we were waiting for the builders to put everything back together again.

"I'm taping up boxes," I told him.

"Don't work too hard," he said.

When Cancer's Lasting Effects Caught Up With Me

Darn, if I didn't do just that. By 2:00, I felt terrible. My back was aching. I had a sharp pain in my latissimus dorsi area, where I'd had a flap procedure for breast cancer. An angiosarcoma, which was caused by radiation from a prior breast cancer in 2011, had been cut out in 2016, and they'd done a flap procedure to close the wound. After I'd had the flap surgery, my surgeon had said that area would never be the same again.

Man, was he right. As a two-time breast cancer survivor with latissimus dorsi scars, I was overdoing it! How could I have thought that I could walk into a factory and work an eight-hour day?

It was 3:30. I was moving quite slowly. The pain was excruciating, almost paralyzing. I couldn't stop watching the clock. Why had I done this? Why had I taken this factory job? The repetitive movements were killing my body, especially my back region.

4:30 didn't come soon enough. I grabbed my purse and practically limped out of the huge building. I had done it; I'd made it through the eight-hour day.

But I was paying for it. I felt as though I was going to die. Everything ached, especially my back. My cancer surgeon had been correct; I wasn't the same.

A Lesson I Won't Forget

The highlight of the day was when the supervisor came up to me as I was going out the door.

"You did fine," she said.

"Thanks."

"I want you to know that I will not put you on the do-not-call list."

"That's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me," I said, smiling.

I left the factory, grateful to be out of there. The bucket seat of my car cradled my back, and I felt soothed.

Driving home was almost a joy because I was sitting down. It had been a long day, but the day had shown me something. At 63, I wasn't as young as I used to be, and cancer had taken its toll. As I write this, my latissimus dorsi flap area aches, a reminder of my day at the factory.

Where's the ibuprofen?

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