By KN Scheirman
She stares ahead at the wall with her soft brown eyes, absorbed in her memories as she talks about the difficult past nine months. She speaks matter of factly, calmly, even, showing little emotion. She is a tiny woman but she is strong; just like her mother and just like her mother raised her to be. The two are alike in many ways and close, which is what made it so difficult for Colorado State University sophomore Laura Heiberger to be hundreds of miles away, living in Iowa, Mich., and Colo., while her mother, Julie, battled breast cancer in Illinois. She has been home less than fifteen days since the diagnosis.Terrifying Text
FORT COLLINS, Colo. — It started with a text message consisting of two sentences. “I got the results of the lumpectomy. I have breast cancer.” Two sentences and Laura’s reality suddenly changed.
Seconds before, the streets of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. were peaceful as Laura drove home from dinner with her grandparents during spring break her freshman year of college, recording everything with her camera as they passed by the beach where people were walking along barefoot, squidging their toes into the grainy, soft sand as darkness fell.
One text message and two sentences later, Laura’s peaceful moment turned sour. She felt a lump in her throat, a drop in her stomach and felt an immediate reaction of panic and then, just as quickly, a second reaction: not knowing how to react. She tuned out her nana’s jabbering, tuned out the radio and dropped her camera onto the beige leather car seat. Frozen for several minutes as thought after thought rushed into her head. As she tried to figure out how to respond to the text message.
Three more words popped up on the phone screen. “Are you OK?” She had never been less OK but she responded to her mom. Two words. “I’m fine.”
“I didn’t want to be like well I’m really scared for you because that’s a chink in the chain of her support system,” Laura said. “I had no idea what to say. Do you go and try to talk to her about her emotional state? Or do you not want to focus on that because she’s already, maybe, a mess?...I didn’t know.”
Julie’s reaction was similar. “At first you’re incredulous. You don’t think it can happen to you and you want to be strong and brave for your family. For your husband and your children,” she said. “It was a shock and it was hard.”
The Beginning
Julie had been in for a mammogram in early March, the week before spring break, and the results were questionable because the doctor’s weren’t sure if she had a tumor or dense breast tissue. She went in for a second mammogram a couple of days later to determine what it was. This time, the doctors were pretty sure there was cancerous tissue so they did a lumpectomy in which they surgically removed the tumor and surrounding tissue. The tumor was malignant. The doctors didn’t know how bad the cancer was at first. There was a chance it had metastasized and had entered her lymphnodes.
“ I definitely couldn’t really focus my school work the week after break because [we didn’t know how bad it was,” Laura said. “I was really worried that maybe it had metastasized… I kept telling myself it will be fine, she’ll be able to get through it just fine, we’re not that unfortunate, hopefully.”
They weren’t that unfortunate. Doctors informed her mom that the cancer had not metastasized and would be fairly easy to treat using a combination of lumpectomies or a mastectomy as well as chemotherapy.
The doctors started treatment right away. Seeing cancer take a not only a physical but a mental toll on Julie was difficult for Laura.
“She’s always had this attitude ‘I’m kind of a little woman but don’t cross me because I’m fierce…and I’m strong, nobody needs to take care of me or hold my hand, I’m fine, I can deal with it.’ [But cancer] isn’t something you can really control and that really made her vulnerable because it broke her attitude that she could beat anything that came her way on her own,” Laura said.
Coping with Cancer from a Distance
“It was like in trying to create a fun year and a fun life for myself, I preplanned setting myself apart from my mom when she went through all this. It was just a series of ‘wow, this sucks’ because it was one thing after another,” Laura said.
While Laura completed her freshman year at the University of Iowa, Julie was deciding whether to try to fight the cancer by getting more lumpectomies, the riskier treatment option, or by having the doctors completely remove her breasts through a mastectomy.
“My mom was having emotional issues,” Laura said. “It was really hard because you need to talk that out and [I wasn’t at home.] I put my two cents in whenever I could, when I was talking to her on the phone or when I came in for a day on the weekends and I think the women helped her decide she should get a mastectomy.”
She and her sister had accepted summer jobs in Mich. on Mackinac Island in January. After the diagnosis, they considered staying with Julie but she convinced them to go.
“She said, ‘if you stay, it’s not going to be fun for you and it’s not going to be fun for me’ and she really wanted us to get the experience,” Laura said.
It was more difficult being away that summer than any other time because that was when Julie was going through chemotherapy.
The best she and her sister could do was offer emotional support via telephone and during the two times she visited them. The first time she visited them was a bit of a shock. She looked so weak and it was the first time they had seen her without her hair. “[To help,] we turned her bald headed-ness, cancer patient-ness into some jokes and we took pictures and pretended she was GI Jane,” Laura said.
Laura didn’t like the University of Iowa campus or the party school atmosphere and decided to transfer to CSU in December of her freshman year. “[After we found out about the cancer,] I considered not transferring schools but at that point, I would have had to go to community college for a year, which my parents wouldn’t have been OK with,” Laura said.
The last major surgery her mom had was reconstructive surgery, which took place this fall during Laura’s first semester at CSU. It did not go well because the doctor didn’t make Julie’s breasts as big as she wanted them to be.
Laura emphasized the positive. “I said at least they’re not saggy like they were before… She needs help sometimes looking at the more positive things. Just because you have cancer, that doesn’t mean you can’t be a happy person, that doesn’t mean you can’t still have good days,” Laura said.
Ready for Research
Laura’s interest in genetics and cancer research started when she took biology in high school. After this experience with her mom, she knew cancer research was her future career.
“For a lot of people cancer just ends up being an inherent predisposition,” Laura said. “It’s right there and it’s a code and it’s really interesting to play with that code to combat what’s going wrong in your body that’s caused by your body.”
More than anything though, she just wants to help people like her mother.
“Cancer affects so many people and it seems like people are victims for no reason,” Laura said. “I really want to help those people. I like to help people and I like biology so I thought [cancer research] was the perfect union.”
She is currently working at the Medford Lab, scrubbing and cleaning. She wants to be able to eventually become involved in research.
The Next Step
The fact that she and her sister, Erika, could also end up with breast cancer is another daunting reality to deal with. “The next step is asking should my sister and I start getting mammograms…or should we hold it off because [my mom] got it later?” Laura said. “I’m going to keep it in my mind that I might and probably will get breast cancer.”
Winter Wonderland
Laura is going home today. She has been counting down the days since she got back from Thanksgiving break. It’s the longest amount of time she’ll have spent with her mother since the diagnosis. Not only that, but her mom is done with her chemotherapy and almost entirely healed from her reconstructive surgery. She is cancer free.
“There’s always a chance that it could come back but her doctors are pretty confident that she’s good and clear to go,” said Laura. “That’s what’s making Christmas break so exciting: the prognosis looks really good. I’m really excited and I know she’s really excited even though she won’t admit how much she misses me. I think she misses me and I miss her too.”
“It will be nice. Hopefully we’ll be able to go to [Chicago- and we’ll try to make cutout cookies,” Julie said.
In less than a day, Laura will be reunited with her whole family – her parents, her sister, and her brother, Daniel. They will make cutout cookies, listen to the “A Charlie Brown Christmas” soundtrack, eat shrimp cocktail and drink eggnog while they decorate the tree. Just like every year. But this year, it’s going to feel more special. They are going to be celebrating life.
Reporter Christopher O'Toole contributed to this report.
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