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She is not a native to Lincoln, but in the few
years she has been here, she has come to love the community, and is
well known among many Lincoln business owners. Always happy, always
ready to offer a good word, that defines Runge. So, it came as quite
a surprise when she stopped in at the LDN office last year for her
pink shirt picture and shared that she is a breast cancer survivor,
of nine years at that time, and ten years now.
She was asked if she would share her story for the
2023 Paint the Paper Pink magazine and she said she would. This
week, LDN met with Andrea and heard her story, which is remarkable,
and one that every woman should hear.
It began 10 years ago in October. She was on the verge of turning 40
as October is her birthday month. She was five years married to a
man that she adored, had a good job, and was a health-conscious
person. She worked out, ate right, never smoked, didn’t drink to
excess, she was doing everything right.
She and husband John had been working on their home,
to put it on the market, and she had been helping a lot. So, when
she started noticing a soreness in her right breast, she delegated
the pain to being part of using muscles she didn’t always use. But
the pain didn’t stop after a few days. Instead it got worse, and
worse, and worse.
On the last day that she was able to tolerate the pain, she did so
but just barely. She said the pain hit her so hard that it buckled
her knees. And of course, John said it was time to go to the doctor
and see what was going on. She put off that visit a few days because
she always had an annual check-up on her birthday, and that was just
around the corner.
When she did go for her check up she told her doctor that she had
this horrific pain in her breast. He did the exam but found no cause
for concern. However, Andrea wasn’t buying it. There was something
wrong, she knew. Her doctor jokingly said that it was October and
breast cancer awareness month. He joked that in October everyone
thinks they have breast cancer. But at the same time, he said that
because she was 40 and it was time to start doing mammograms anyway
he would order a mammogram and a “diagnostic” on the right side.
Runge was well endowed and had very dense breasts. The pain she was
feeling was low on the inside of her right breast, but the doctor
had felt nothing. When the mammogram was ordered for the next week,
Andrea was not all that concerned. She said John had wanted to go
with her and she had told him that would be silly. He would be left
to sit in a waiting room while she had the test then it would be
done, and he would have missed work for no reason. So, she went
alone for her mammogram and diagnostic.
Andrea remembers that the technician had been very happy and
chatty….until she was not. The technician had left the screen
visible and gone to get the radiologist. Andrea recalls specifically
seeing the large black area in her breast. She said, “it was a black
spot with horns, and it just looked evil.”
The radiologist came in and asked her if she had seen the images,
she said ‘well yes, I’m human, I looked.” The radiologist said they
were going to order a needle biopsy on the spot.
Those who know Andrea know that she likes shoes, and
she has cute ones. On that day she was wearing her kitty shoes. They
had kitty faces on the toes with rhinestones and such. She recalls
looking down at those kitties and thinking “Well this is an
interesting predicament we’ve gotten ourselves into kitties.”
Before the biopsy Andrea said she wanted to go to the bathroom. The
technician said she shouldn’t go alone. Andrea remembers at the
time thinking that was a little odd. She was a grown woman, capable
of going potty on her own, but she was told that she just really
shouldn’t be alone, and someone should go with her to the restroom.
When it came time for the biopsy, it was a very painful experience
for Andrea, because there were several tries to get it done. She
recalls the doctor saying, “Now that wasn’t so bad was it?” He then
asked her to rate the pain experience, and she told him between one
and 10, her pain was a 12.
She also remembers there were a number of people who kept coming and
going.
“It was like one of those Saturday Night Live episodes where people
keep coming in and then calling someone else to come in, and then
another, until finally the doctor comes in and the gig is up that
none of the others are doctors.” She said, “it was like all these
people were coming but they weren’t telling me anything.”
After the biopsy Andrea was given an ice pack for her breast and
remembers the little pink ribbons on it.
The technician stayed with her while Andrea applied the pack and
then asked what Andrea was going to do for the rest of the day. For
Andrea, the obvious answer was “I’m going back to work.” The
technician said she wasn’t sure that was a good idea.
When Andrea left, she drove to her husband’s workplace just a few
blocks away. She shared what had happened, the mammogram, the needle
biopsy, but told him no one had said she had cancer.
There was a lot going on in Andrea and John’s world as they were
showing their home that was on the market. An open house was
scheduled for that following Sunday and the two went out for brunch
during the open house. It was there that she finally asked her
husband, “What if…” John’s response was whatever it was, they would
deal with it together. The weekend passed
and on Monday Andrea looked for a call that did not come. Then on
Tuesday she had a big meeting at work she was preparing for. She was
at the office when she received a call from Memorial Hospital.
Andrea remembers the caller being light and airy, very chatty, and
thinking this is not the cadence or attitude of a person who is
about to say, “you have cancer.” But she did. Andrea recalls the
same sing-song-ee voice on the phone saying, “Unfortunately you have
breast cancer.” There were more words that came afterward, all meant
to be encouraging. The voice said that she was a cancer survivor
with a similar diagnosis as Andrea. It was meant to be an
encouraging conversation without gloom and doom, but at the time it
more or less fell on deaf ears.
Andrea said for the next little while, she and John became students
of breast cancer. They did the research and read everything they
could find online. Even so, they were not prepared for the next
blow. She met with a surgeon who still said he could not feel the
tumor. Because of that and her age, the plan of action was quite
radical.
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The next step for Andrea was an MRI which was not a
comfortable experience. She had to lie on her stomach with her arms
over her head. The table had a special section where her breasts
were to lay, more or less hanging through the bottom of the table.
She said she had been asked what kind of music she wanted, and she
chose show tunes because they were happy with upbeat rhythms.
The work done eventually determined that Andrea’s tumor was about
one inch in diameter, slow growing, and had been in her body for
possibly as many as 14 years.
That final recommendation was that Andrea undergo a radical
mastectomy with both breasts being removed, and a complete
hysterectomy removing the uterus and the ovaries.
In essence, the end result would be surgical menopause. Afterward,
she would not have to have chemotherapy or radiation, which she says
was the luckiest part of her diagnosis. She would have to take
medications to compensate for what she had lost, and she had to take
an aromatase inhibitor because her cancer was
estrogen-positive-HER2-negative. This meant the cancer was estrogen
based and therefore could spread into other regions of the body.
It was such a hard blow for Andrea. She explains that it was about
no longer being anatomically correct. She was not going to be a
woman anymore; she was not going to be anything at all.
Andrea did decide to have breast reconstruction
surgery. She said it wasn’t about vanity as much as it was about
doing what was best for her mental health. “a lot of me felt like I
wasn’t much of a woman anymore.” She said her surgery was about not
thinking about what had happened to her. She said she didn’t want to
walk by a mirror every day and be reminded of what was missing, and
today, she doesn’t. “I had everything reconstructed, my breasts and
my nipples, so when I look I don’t see the scares, I don’t see what
I am not.”
Andrea said John was a rock throughout her entire course of action.
And, he had urged her to get a second opinion. Andrea said at that
time, she was not in the right place to go through it all again. She
didn’t want a second opinion; she just wanted it all to be over.
John insisted. “I finally told him if you can figure out how to
get me a second opinion where I have to go nowhere, talk to no one,
they don’t feel my breast, they don’t take my shirt off, and they
don’t inconvenience me in any way then you go for it, and he did.”
Andrea explained that her husband was working as a project manager
for the construction of the Simmons Cancer Center at Memorial in
Springfield. He spoke with one of the doctors whom he was acquainted
with, and the doctor agreed to look at all the information available
and offer an opinion. That doctor agreed with the original plan of
action and John was satisfied.
Andrea says she also believes that her cancer was harder on her
husband than it was on her, in a different way of course, but still
much harder. She said mainly, he spent a lot of time making her
behave herself. She had orders to follow including she had to sleep
elevated, and she wasn’t permitted to raise her arms.
John fixed her a place on the couch and throughout the night would
set the alarm and get up to tend to her scheduled needs. He would
help with medications and bring her “cracker baby” snack with almond
milk. He took notes on all of her progress and helped keep her
wounds clean and dressed. She said that because of this the drain
tubes she had were removed sooner than anticipated.
She said the true test of commitment may have been the day she said
she was not going to go any longer without shaving her underarms. He
argued with her that she was not supposed to do that, she couldn’t
lift her arms. Being her stubborn self, Andrea told him it was going
to happen. What did happen, she said was remarkable. Getting down on
his knees, she rested her hand on his head, and he shaved her
underarms for her, an act of love that brings tears to Andrea’s eyes
even today, 10 years after the fact.
Andrea says that all of her cancer story happened the way it was
supposed to. She doesn’t think she could have done much of anything
differently. She was healthy, she had her checkups, she was
physically active, and other than maybe looking into the pain a
little bit sooner than she did, there was nothing to tell her she
needed to worry.
Always being the one to laugh at herself, Andrea said that her fake
breasts are pretty nice. They are not as large as her own, but they
are good. She laughs and says, “the rest of me may sag and bag but
these babies are always going to be good.”
Andrea said there were also hidden blessings that
came out in the open when she was diagnosed. She said you are often
aware that people care for you, love you. But when they find you are
battling, they are more expressive of that love, more open with
their feelings and their support. “So, it is a blessing wrapped in a
tumor.”
The cancer also changed Andrea’s life in other positive ways. She
said that she decided to change careers, to go back to school and
get her higher degrees, she came to Lincoln and took on a project
that was brand new and untested. She has bravery in her professional
life and her personal life that she didn’t have before.
Before cancer, “I was never a risk taker, scared of everything,
never spontaneous, and too afraid to ever focus on what was
possible. Now I’m like what’s the worst that could happen?”
For the sake of the other women in her family, she had the BRCA
testing. In the end it determined that her cancer was not genetic.
She said what she was finally told was that her cancer was “just bad
luck.”
[Nila Smith]
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