Raising Maine

I have a friend I'll call Tammy. She is not a regular friend--she is a lifesaver. You know how some friends just show up and you get lucky? She's one of those. She's my pal.

She isn't pretty and she isn't funny, in fact she's very plain and kind of bland. She's not that helpful, really, which is unusual for a lifesaver of a friend--she doesn't do my laundry or listen to me when I need to sound off. She's kind of lazy really--she just sits there and waits for me to show up and take her in each day. Some friend, you say--my relationship standards must need work.

Really, though, she is a lifesaver.

Because every day for the past five years she's been at my side, staring me in the face every morning, sitting on my pill table, waiting for me to open her bottle and swallow her whole. Tammy is a nickname I have for a drug called Tamoxifen. Tamoxifen has been what the doctors say has helped keep breast cancer from rearing its ugly head in my life these past 5 years.

Today however, there was no Tammy. And you may think "Hey, I thought she was your lifesaver? Where'd she go?" Well, Tammy said good-bye. She hit the road to go help some other cancer survivor get through her first 5 years post breast cancer diagnosis.

Those rough scary years when your body is hit with surgery and/or chemotherapy and/or radiation and/or Hell. Those days and weeks when you worry you won't be here to teach your children to tie a shoe or help get through a first big heart break when somebody doesn't invite them to the junior prom. That terrible time when your treatments are done and you look at the doctor and think, please don't leave me out there in the world to fight this thing alone. And the doctor says in words that are medical but sound like a Godsend, "Now you can take the drug Tamoxifen to keep the cancer from coming back."

And Tammy becomes your new best friend. What I mean is, my best friend.

But today I woke up and took my vitamins and my fruit juice and I looked at the empty pill bottle where Tammy used to be. She was good to me, she took care of my health for 1, 825 days, but today is day 1,826 and my 5 years are up. I now don't take her anymore.

I no longer need Tammy in my life, in fact I can't take her any more--she might cause me more harm than good. So we have to part. Now it's just me and my vitamins and my healthy habits for the rest of my life, a life I know I don't have to say this but I will say it anyway--a life I hope is very long indeed.

And if that turns out to be the case and I do get that long life after all, I have many things and people to thank for my next years on earth: the good medicine I received, the doctors who cared for me, the health insurance I am lucky to have--

and a 5 year friendship with Tammy the wonder drug, who I am hoping has made it possible for me to be here for that junior prom heartbreak (the shoe-tying lesson was given this year.)

Tammy, Tamoxifen--whatever I call her--with luck she'll have done enough to keep that nasty disease from ever returning. Like I said, I am calling her my lifesaver--

time will tell if I am right.