Sandra and Peggy
Left to right: Sandra and Peggy
By Sandra, a Sister Study participant from Nebraska
Sisters at last
I told her she was adopted. Such a cruel thing for a bossy eight-year-old to tell her innocent little six-year-old sister. She cried. I loved it.
She wasn’t adopted. We just had more photos in the family album of me me me, because growing up in the 1950s it was all about me. I hated my little sister.
I pushed her out of the tree swing. She plummeted awkwardly to the ground, landing on her arm. “Don’t tell,” I warned. She whimpered and sniveled and finally couldn’t stand the pain any longer. She “told” and ended up with a very cool cast on her broken wrist.
As teenagers, I yanked her long hair so hard, I pulled out her pierced earring the painful, ugly way. I hogged the teen phone line. I laughed when she drove the car into a telephone poll. I reveled when she came home late to face grounding. And I raided her parents-aren’t-home party and got her into bigtime trouble.
As adults, we were openly civil but never close, so her divorce was a surprise, and I chose not to speak to her for a year over that. She remarried.
“I had a breast lump removed, it’s cancer,” she announced. As grown women with kids and dogs and husbands who love us, we were finally on speaking terms, occasionally, even though I hadn’t put her phone number on the speed dial. And now we talk a lot. Every single day.
She needs me, and I need her too. I’m her long-distance coach through medical decision making. We discussed the treatment options and researched the doctors together. We reviewed her ominous surgical and pathology report, the positive lymph nodes, cried over the lost breast. And decided that because half the women with this staging and diagnosis had a good outcome, she would surely be in that group. No question.
This time, if she falls out of the tree swing, I’m there to catch her. The big sister and the little sister. Sisters at last.
[I wrote this story for Chicken Soup for the Soul, Healthy Living, Breast Cancer as a way to tell others what a profound impact breast cancer has on relationships, never realizing that it would later be my inauguration into the sisterhood among those of us with sisters who have breast cancer through the Sister Study. When someone you love has a serious illness, you will do anything to help. Participation in the Sister Study is one way to “do anything to help” – our own sisters, our sisterhood, our daughters and granddaughters. Share your time and your story. This is one health journey I would never want to miss.]
--Sandra and Peggy hiked the Grand Canyon together during Peggy’s radiation treatments.