Cancer survivor offers support, love
ZANESVILLE — Martha Holbein, a breast cancer survivor, often meets women who have recently received that gut punch of a diagnosis and want advice.
"It's a struggle to go through, and it can be devastating," she would say. "But stay positive, stay positive, and repeat that to yourself, and you'll be a survivor."
Then she'll get to the heart of the matter.
If you are considering a double mastectomy, she would tell women, you should know how the procedure will change your life.
After surgery, when you wake up in the hospital bed, the weight of the pain and the bandages will be like an elephant on your chest.
In the days to come, a doctor will slide a needle through the ports that have been implanted in the tender flesh under both armpits — "like having a knife stab into an open wound" — and saline solution will be pumped into the hollow area where the breasts have been removed, that flap of leftover skin slowly filling and expanding to make room for the implants.
This will happen weekly.
For the six months it takes for the skin sacks to expand properly, do not expect comfort at any time.
Hint: Learn to sleep on your back.
And when the implants are finally inserted, get used to the unnatural firmness — "This is you now, after all" — and recognize that a part of you has been removed.
Now then, she will say.
Look at yourself in the mirror.
Know that you are lucky to be here.
Remember all that led to this point.
The battle
Martha Holbein was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002 after a series of mammograms revealed erratic spots of calcification in her breast tissue — but don't worry just yet, her doctor said, this kind of calcification is usually harmless, with less than 10 percent of cases turning out to be cancer.
"Well," Holbein said later, "I guess I was in the lucky 10 percent!"
The truth is, a cancer diagnosis can tear your life apart, but a new life of procedural steps and calculations will take its place, she said. Days become organized around strategy, with your doctor acting as a battle technician, crafting a plan that will allow you to sneak up on the disease and destroy it before it destroys you.
Holbein took a trip to the Breast Cancer Second Opinion Clinic at Riverside Hospital in Columbus, hoping that something would be found — a blip on the mammogram, a stroke of good fortune in her blood tests — that would wipe away her cancer in a miraculous flourish.
"But, nope, I still had cancer," she said.
Then began the treatment.
A double mastectomy, just like that.
Chemotherapy to rid the cancer from her lymph nodes, a feeling like the worst flu of your life multiplied tenfold.
Days bent over the toilet, she said, with your chest hurting from the surgery, vomiting air from a stomach that had been empty for hours, tasting metal on your tongue and feeling gutted — a hollow, broken body that you are now forced to occupy.
But if you decide to wear a wig, she said, at least you'll never have a bad hair day.
"You have to laugh about it. The wig gets incredibly hot and scratchy in the summer, and I would just look forward to going into my office to take it off and let my head breathe."
Holbein, who worked at Kroger before retiring a few years ago, can remember the occasions when one of the young men working at the store would pop into her office to ask a quick question — only to see her running a hand over her bald scalp with what looked like a dead animal lying on her desk.
She has other happy-sad memories like that. One of her friends, a woman who also underwent a double mastectomy but opted for prostheses instead of reconstruction, would get tipsy at parties and flip the prosthetic breasts around her back while dancing on table tops. Another friend would come into Kroger and make sure Holbein gave her a snappy pep talk to help with her own cancer treatment, a memory that still remains happy for Holbein even after the friend died of the disease.
She doesn't get mad about it, she said.
No — it's better to turn your energy toward helping the woman who are still stuck in the trenches.
Offering support
Tammy Jeffers, who began working at Kroger shortly after Holbein retired, learned firsthand about the relativity of time after a strange dot appeared on her yearly mammogram results back in 2013.
"Have a doctor take a biopsy of your breast tissue to test it for cancer, and the next five days while you wait for the results will be the longest five days of your life," Jeffers said.
Through Holbein, Jeffers was set up with an appointment at the second opinion clinic in Columbus, and that experience for Jeffers remains a rare bright spot in an otherwise dim blur.
"Everything is just swirled up," Jeffers said. "You thoughts, your memories: It's all just such a blur now that I can't even tell you what was going through my head."
But here was a team of doctors focused solely on her, and here was a free lunch in a bright eating area. After her consultation, which confirmed the diagnosis she had received in Zanesville — breast cancer, Stage 0, caught as early as possible — she underwent a lumpectomy, a procedure which surgically removes the tumor that contains the cancer but not the whole breast.
Sparred the pain of having to go through chemotherapy, Jeffers still had regular radiation treatments that left her breast red and burning.
"Your routines begin to change," she said.
For instance: Applying topical creams to treat the radiation burns became a nightly ritual. Understanding that life was uncertain and can become unhinged at any time became a reality.
Each day takes on a different tone, Jeffers said, and she has slowed down to enjoy life, to take it all in while she still has it.
Life itself
These are the cases that give Holbein a sense of purpose, the reason why she spends so much time sandblasting personalized glassware to later sell at cancer research fundraisers, why she puts so much time in attending support groups and remembering those who are gone.
Although her own treatment was successful and she has been cancer-free for over a decade, she still has other reminders. The body she now inhabits will always be changed from what it once was. The pills she takes to prevent the disease from returning leave her bones brittle to the point where even getting out of the car can require assistance.
"But you keep going, and maybe it gets better," Holbein said. "Or maybe I just got used to it, who knows?"
For now, she said, whenever she meets women who have recently begun their own battle with breast cancer, all she can do is offer her own story, in the hopes that it will allow these women to feel supported, to feel less alone, to know that a woman who was once in their position made it to the other side — which is life itself.
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