Northridge High School 2901 Northridge Road Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35406
est. 2003
THE OCTOBER 2018
NORTH RI D GE
www.northridgereporter.wordpress.com
REPORTER
The student est.voice 2003of Northridge High School
VOLUME 16 ISSUE 2
PINK AND PROUD Theater teacher reflects on her fierce breast cancer battle SCARLETT MAPLES COVER EDITOR
In the United States, women have a 12.4 percent chance of getting diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. This means for every eight women, one woman will be diagnosed. October is internationally recognized as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, during which awareness is increased and money is raised to help research and find a cure. Last year, Northridge raised $750 for the Breast Cancer Foundation at DCH and hopes to surpass that amount in the donations given this year. Throughout the week, zero periods have taken up donations, with Mallie Humber’s class in the lead with $159.00. They will present $725.00 to Casey Johnson of the Breast Cancer Foundation.Of the 3.1 million breast cancer survivors in the U.S., Northridge is blessed to have our wonderful English and theatre teacher, Donna Wright. Wright was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in 2006 at age 39. “It was odd because I’ve been having mammograms every other year for years,” Wright said. “I found a lump when I was in college, and we don’t have a family medical history; I’m adopted.” Statistically, the chances of a woman getting breast cancer are doubled if a first degree relative has had breast cancer, so it is quite uncommon that Wright was diagnosed. Wright went in for her mammogram. “So I just had my biannual booby squish... and while I was waiting for the results to come back, I found this funny spot in the left breast.” Women are encouraged to check themselves for odd lumps and symptoms of breast cancer so that they can catch it early–not to only rely on the mammogram. When the radiology clinic called, they said that something was up, and they needed Wright to go in. She figured
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it was for the spot she had found, but it turned out that it was in the right breast. Around the same time, Wright’s close friend from graduate school was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. It’s incredibly nasty and rare–so rare, she said, that “your other doctors have never seen it outside of a textbook.” This cancer, that starts out at stage 3 and that is already in the lymph system, terrified Wright. She called her doctor, who scheduled her for an ultrasound on a Tuesday and told her to see her surgeon. The ultrasound almost missed the lump that Wright had. She had to physically show the physician who then had her hold everything in place. “Then it starts to pick up,” she said. “They found not one but two little spots...and they were connected by this little cancer bridge.” This is another reason why women need to be diligent in checking themselves for spots and lumps, because technology cannot be 100 percent accurate every time. If Wright hadn’t found her spot, the doctors might not have caught it as early as they did. On Thursday, Wright went to see her surgeon, and went back the next day for a core needle biopsy. They called back and told her that they got all of one, but needed her to come back to make sure they got all of the other and to see if it had gotten into the lymph nodes. “If it’s hit the lymph nodes, that means it’s hit the body’s highways and can spread,” Wright said. When she went back, they told her there were actually four spots, not two. “21/23 lymph nodes that they pulled had cancer in them,” she said. Her surgeon advised her to have a lumpectomy because it wouldn’t be that noticeable; however, every time they sent out the lump they found more evidence of the malignant cancer. Wright had talked with her husband about what to do in this event and told him, “Don’t let them close me up if there’s anything in there. That’s ridiculous...They [her breasts] will kill me.” The doctors went through with a mastectomy while Wright’s family waited.
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“They [Wright’s children] actually knew that I’d had a mastectomy before I did because I was still knocked out in the recovery room,” she said. Her kids, Ben and Xan, were aged 9 and 5 at the time. Wright had to go through eight rounds of chemotherapy next. Many of the drugs she was given were toxic. One in particular required her nurse to wear huge, bulky gloves and a protective face mask to ensure that she would not be exposed. “[The drug] is extremely corrosive. We have to wear protective gear when we administer it,” her nurse had explained. The first two rounds of chemo were bearable. Wright thought it wasn’t too bad and that she could make it–then came the third round. “I felt like I’d been hit by a truck,” she said. One of the nurses said that this was actually a good sign. The chemo was now doing its job of killing off the fast-growing cells in the body, which is why Wright felt so tired and began to lose her hair. “When you think of losing hair, you think the hair on your head,” Wright said. “No. You lose your eyebrows. You lose your eyelashes. You lose your nose hair, which you think would be okay until you realize that nose hair filters out dust and pollen; no filter anymore. I did not have to shave my legs much that summer so that was nice.” Some other side affects that Wright experienced through her bouts of chemo were nausea, thrush, and neuropathy (numbness in the hands and feet from nerve damage). “Thankfully, I got some [feeling] back, not as much as I would have liked, but you’ll take what you can get,” she said. Cancer patients are also exhausted all the time and look different Photo by Tribune News Service than their normal selves.. “It’s like you’re looking at the bride of Frankenstein in the mirror, but it’s you,” Wright said. At one point, her doctors told her that she may experience a radiation burn, which is like a sunburn, only worse. They said
that she may have to go without a bra because it would be uncomfortable, to which Wright was vehemently opposed to, seeing as though she works in a high school with teenagers. Wright and her husband chose not to keep the fact that she had cancer from her children. “There’s no sense in keeping it from them,” she said. “When you have cancer, you’re going to look sick.” Ben was old enough at the time to understand that his mother was sick, but did not grasp the full reality of it. Xan was fascinated, and told her mother that she wanted her reconstruction to be rainbow colored. During the diagnosis, Wright kept teaching at the school as much as she could. Fortunately, Wright had an amazing student teacher that semester. “She held it together,” Wright said. The reason the kids got what they needed is because she was there doing what she needed.” Her theater students were also a great help. “They’d babysit or just take the kids to a movie to get them out of the house,” she said. “My kids loved it because they got to hang out with the big kids.” The summer after that semester, Wright completed her treatment with daily radiation. Chemo wasn’t as taxing because it’s a weekly thing. “You can lay at home and bemoan your state and hate cancer and try to find something that doesn’t make you want to vomit,” she said. “But with radiation, you have to get up and go, whether you feel like it or not.” Aside from Wright, there are several other families at Northridge who have been through breast cancer. Sophomore Katelyn Lovinggood’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in the middle of stage two and three a couple years ago, when Lovinggood was 14. “My mom found out the day after her 40th birthday,” Lovinggood said. Like Wright, Lovinggood’s mother is also a teacher, now at Northridge Middle School. “She taught until she couldn’t teach in her class anymore, because it was dangerous for her to be around that many
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