Flash player is required to view weather conditions. Download

site web  

It was Jan. 27, 2008, a winter Sunday afternoon, and as part of a daily routine, Janet Barbosa got undressed, unfastened her bra.

There was a lump.

She first thought of her sister whose breast lump was simply a cyst.

Barbosa, 60, prayed for a similar diagnosis. A cyst never sounded so good.

Instead, the mammogram revealed a cancerous lump resided in Barbosa's left breast.

Now came the hardest part. She had to tell John, her husband of 42 years.

His reaction was predictable.

"He turned white," she said Friday, June 20, holding back tears while sitting in a conference room in The Compton Center at the Atrium Medical Center. "He took it hard, probably harder than me."

Then she added: "It still scares me."

Her next thought concerned her five grown children, her 20 grandchildren, who range from 4 months to 22 years old, and her great-grandchild due in November.

She didn't worry about herself. She considered herself a mother first, a woman battling cancer second.

"I want to see my grandchildren grow up," she said quietly.

Since she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, instead of, say, 1958, her survival rate is much higher, said Mary Noll, manager of the radiology oncology department at Compton.

Today's women, more educated than their mothers, are detecting breast cancer sooner, and because of medical advancements, are finding the disease is "very curable," Noll said.

Less than a month after the lump was accidentally found, Barbosa had a lumpectomy where the cancerous tumor was removed. The surgeon "got it all," she said.

She was told that chemotherapy would only increase her 10-year survival rate by 4 percent.

"Who knows if I'll be around in 10 years anyway?" she said.

So she chose radiation instead. She took 5-minute radiation treatments five days a week for six days.

She called the Compton medical staff "so wonderful."

"I can't say enough good things about them," she said.

Being a cancer survivor has changed her outlook. What she called "the little things," no longer bother her.

"I've got more living to do," she said.

She's got more grandchildren — and great-children — to spoil.

Contact this

columnist

at (513) 705-2842 or rmccrabb@coxohio.com.