Guest Blog: “A Message of Hope and Healing”

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Guest Blog Post – 4

By Deanna Roy

January 2024, Newfoundland and Labrador

My name is Deanna Roy, I was diagnosed June 1st, 2018 with stage 4 HR2 positive metastatic breast cancer at the age of 42.

From St, John’s Newfoundland and my cancer journey is not a typical cancer journey in the way that I found out I had cancer.

Me and my best friend were out shopping. I left a local store to step down. From the sidewalk, I thought I tripped.

But later I found out my leg gave out, I could not get up so we had to call an ambulance. They brought me to the hospital, which was the Health Sciences, ‘cause that was the closest when I was there.

I went in Emerge. They gave me X-Ray, and then they said they were going to put me in surgery right away.

But it didn’t happen because something else showed up on the X-Ray, and then I had to go under another lot of tests. I was asked strange questions.

And later on that evening, in Emerge, I found out that I had breast cancer and that’s why when I stepped down, my knee and some of my tibia and other parts of my leg just, I guess, disintegrated.

Of course, they admitted me into the hospital. I had to have surgery, but I had to wait a week because they had to figure out how do they were going to do surgery.

And then, I found out that I had to have radiation and chemo.

It started. I only had to have 10 rounds of radiation so they started that while I was still in the hospital. I was in the hospital for 3 weeks. They had to reconstruct my leg.

And then after I left in the end of July, I started my cancer treatment, which was chemo.

I had to have so many rounds and that brought me until December of that same year, which I had to go every 3 weeks to get, and then after I was finished my chemo, I still had to get some treatments that was both to keep occurring for the rest of my life and plus I had to have a bone treatment as well to strengthen my bones.

But along this journey, I had many ups and downs.

And then, a year and a half ago I ended up with an infection in my leg.

They had it under control and then I shaved my leg and caused the hole and that caused the infection to start leaking.

And I had to go in and have 4 more surgeries on my leg and I was on very strong antibiotics.

And that would interfere with my treatment. So, I had to stop my treatments for total of 10 months.

Through the stoppage, and that, and after everything was clears and I could go back and see my oncologist, they did a CAT scan that showed that I had no cancer growth whatsoever. It was all clear, which you could not, because at the stage 4, it’s very hard to keep it under control.

But with all the treatment and stuff, now I don’t have to have any more treatment because the cancer is not growing. Every 3 months, I’ll just have a CAT scan and they’ll keep an eye on it until I need to start having some more treatment but hopefully it doesn’t come back.

I want to say this when you hear stage 4, you think it’s a death sentence. But it doesn’t have to be a death sentence. Go on and live your life the best way you can and keep a positive attitude. And, anything is possible you can beat anything and with my diagnosis, my average life span, which none of the doctors ever told me, was only as 3 years life expectancy. I’m almost going on my 6th year. So anything is possible.

I know it is hard but if there are people out there that can help you through it. You can go and you have family members.

You could talk to people and just share your story.

And another thing is all the professionals told me “Don’t go and research stuff online”, because it’s all negative and I took their voice. I never looked online to read anything.

I only started doing that probably around 4 years after, a couple of years ago, I just started looking up all the information because sometimes, there’s a lot of false information out and you don’t need that looking at all the bad stuff that could happen. All you need is positivity and a good feel and you can get through anything. You can talk to social workers you can talk to a therapist, if you need to.

I had good support and it made my journey a lot easier.

You will have bad days, but on your bad days, you’ll just rest and on your good days, go.

And it is, for me, it was a big life change. I never thought of it.

And also, my husband had to stop his job because he had to take care of me and it was a big financial burden, but through other programs and stuff as people there to help. I got long term disability and stuff with the company I used to work with. So, I’m more fortunate than other people that is going through the same thing. And they can’t afford to stop working. But sometimes you have to just to eliminate some distress and all that.

Sometimes you just, I don’t know, just live one day at a time.

Some people get in a rabbit hole that they can’t get out of but there is a rabbit hole that you can get out of and I just want you to know that.

Disclaimer: Guest blogs are the purposes of education and/or sharing perspectives. The information shared by bloggers should not be interpreted as medical advice. All health information should be discussed with your health care provider. The website owners are not responsible for the contents of the guest blog posts.

This guest blog is a part of a public – scientist collaborative project led by the Public Interest Group on Cancer Research in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. For further information, please see here: mun.yaffle.ca/projects/15039.