“I don’t know how people who don’t have faith get from one day to the next. Whether I’m healed in this life or the next, I must live with hope. I have to live expecting that my life still has good and that it matters.”
Donna Carole Kitchens, mother and grandmother, or Bibi as she is called, has striking green eyes and a joyful disposition. She also has metastatic breast cancer.
Five years ago, she self-diagnosed a pain in her side as gallbladder issues.
“I had this pain in my side for about a month. It would get very intense, then disappear. Like so many women, I didn’t feel like I had time to deal with an illness,” Kitchens laughed. “So, I did the next best thing: I consulted Dr. Google and decided that I was having gallbladder issues.”
Returning from a trip to Atlanta, Kitchens had a sudden onset of pain so unbearable, her need for relief was urgent.
“I called my husband and daughter to let them know I was headed straight to Roper Hospital’s ER.”
Kitchens’ symptoms were so analogous to her Google findings, she wasn’t surprised when both the ER nurse and physician surmised that she might have gallstones and sent her to imaging.
What did surprise her was the uneasy silence and concerned face of the physician when he returned to her room.
“Your gallbladder is fine,” the doctor quietly stated. “But you have cancer. You have cancer in your uterus, your liver, your bones. …”
“After he said the word cancer, everything went silent for me,” Kitchens recalled. “I could see his lips moving, but I couldn’t hear anything. Finally, I asked him to again list areas of my cancer.”
As the news was repeated, Kitchens lost her composure.
“Screaming, I tried to rip the IV out of my arm. I was so angry and I was losing it,” she said. After a dose of Ativan, she doesn’t remember much.
Just as she and Google were incorrect, so too were physicians. Kitchens’ curious case of cancer was a tangled mystery that required exploratory surgeries and several tests with a gynecological oncologist.
She didn’t have uterine cancer after all. There was nothing there.
“We’ve cleared you of uterine cancer, lung and breast cancers. We’ve biopsied your liver and sent it off for testing,” Kitchens’ physician informed her. “I’ll call you by Friday.”
Friday became the following Tuesday, and all her physician could tell her was, “You do have cancer. We just can’t figure out its source. I’ll call you back as soon as I know something.”
A week later, they didn’t know anything other than that it wasn’t a gynecological cancer, so she was referred to a well-known Charleston oncologist, Dr. Yanis Bellil.
The night before Kitchens was scheduled to see him, a pingpong ball-sized lump materialized in her breast, seemingly out of nowhere. Bellil ordered a PET scan and promised Kitchens that they would find the source of the cancer.
Two days later, Bellil’s news hit Kitchens hard: “You have Stage 4 breast cancer. Specifically, HER2+.”
Cancer invaded a vast territory in Kitchens’ body: breast, 11 bones, over 20 spots on her sternum, and a tumor in her liver so large that it stretched the lining of the organ.
Kitchens started a Facebook page, Donna Carole’s Cancer Journey, to help friends and family stay informed about her condition and treatments. In the five years it’s been up and running, Kitchens’ page has turned into a haven for those struggling with cancer, specifically cancer that is never going to go away.
Kitchens recalled the day that it became more than a space to share general information.
“I had a wig on, drawn-on brows and ran into an acquaintance who didn’t really know what was going on at the time. I stood there, chatting in the heat, sweating under that wig,” she said. “Shortly afterwards, I saw my reflection in a mirror. My fake hair had rubbed off my fake brows, my fake eyelashes were about to come off and I’d had this fake smile plastered on my face while we were talking. Fake. Fake. Fake. Everything was fake and I wasn’t fine.”
Deciding that she couldn’t pretend another moment, she went home and poured her heart out onto her Facebook page. Since that time, Kitchens’ friends, family and people she’s never met read her honest thoughts and feelings about navigating the terrain of her cancer treatment.
Stable for five years, Kitchens is pleased to report that her liver and breasts are clear of disease. Cancer is still evident on her bones but is contained and stable.
Because the nature of HER2+ is that it often returns in a mutated form, resistant to any medication the patient may be on, Kitchens must submit to multiple scans every three months for life.
“I will always be a cancer patient and I will always be in treatment,” Kitchens sighed. She admitted to having dark days and moments of sadness.
“I still look in the mirror and scream, shake my fist at heaven. My hope, though, is that I can be an encouragement to even one person who is actively living with cancer — and still cry about it sometimes,” Kitchens laughed.
“But that’s not all that I am,” she added. “I look at it this way: I’ve lost so much because of cancer. I am not going to allow cancer to take anything else from me.”
By Amy Gesell
