Breast cancer survivor ‘holds on to normal’
Day 17. She had been warned about it. She knew it was inevitable. And yet when Alana Somerville looked down in the shower and saw clumps of her hair swirling around the drain, it all became abruptly real.
She had cancer.
“You’re told you have cancer, but you don’t look like you have cancer,” says the now 40-year-old mom to Charley, 11, and eightyear-old Rudy.
That day in the shower on the 17th day of her chemotherapy treatments for an aggressive, fast-growing breast cancer, she felt defeated.
“I looked down and there was so much hair at the bottom of the shower,” she says.
She picked up clumps of the blonde, past-the-shoulder hair, and threw it into the garbage. And cried.
“You are one of those people now who has cancer,” she recalls. “It made everything so real.”
Somerville writes in her book “Holding on to Normal” (Simon & Schuster, $29.99), about her journey with cancer that began in 2010 when she was 33 and her youngest child, Rudy, was then six months old.
Anecdotes in the book are drawn from a series of emails she wrote during her journey, at first to keep friends updated on her progress. Then when she was feeling better, and the intensity of cancer was in her past, she reread some of those thoughts and decided to write a book.
Her motivation was to tell the story to her children. If the cancer was to come back, it would happen in the first year, she was told.
“If something happened to me, I wanted them to know me,” says Somerville, a Grade 5 teacher in Fort Erie.
When her book ended up in the hands of a publisher, Somerville was challenged to share more detailed, more personal anecdotes. To give it a voice. To take a risk and show her vulnerabilities, as well as her strengths.
So, she did.
She writes about the sadness she felt the last time her daughter Charley styled her long hair with elastic bands and barrettes, soon before her hair was to be cut in anticipation of it falling out.
“I was thinking these days are gone,” she says. “These moments could be lost forever.”
She wrote about her decision to have both breasts removed, and then reconstructed, for one simple yet profound reason: life.
“You feel betrayed by them,” she says.
And when her breasts were gone, and a post-chemo fuzz covered her head, she made herself a T-shirt in response to the awkward glances directed her way. On it, she had printed the words: Yes they’re fake! (My real ones tried to kill me).
“If you’re going to look at me with pity, this is my counteraction,” she says.
She still thinks about cancer every day. If she gets a backache, maybe the tumour has returned?
“There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think, what if ?”