,2 ]U S t O lii
xtober A.2004
16
S urviving
Big Brothers Big Sisters
Cancer survivor: 1 don't sit around thinking about dying'
by M.L. Madison
o f Metropolitan Port lain/
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Geoffrey U. Wren
the J ourney
pend just a few minutes with Laura
Stride and the word “guts” imprints
itself in your mind.
Stride isn’t short of them. The 38-
year-old Portland lesbian opted for a
double mastectomy last December after being
diagnosed with breast cancer, and she hasn’t
looked hack.
“All the things 1 need to feel like a whole
person, to feel happy, to feel sexy, to feel com
plete— my breasts were nowhere in that equa
tion,” said Stride, who showed her surgical scars
during an interview with Just Out.
Stride, who does free-lance film production,
was the location manager for What the Bleep Do
We Know? She returned to work in July, after
several months of cancer treatment.
“It’s not like you can work on taxol and adry-
omiacin,” she noted, referring to her treatment,
which is also known as the
“a/c cycle.”
Stride’s ordeal began last
November, on a trip to visit a
friend in Montana. She’d had
a suspicious lump outside her
right breast for several months
but hadn’t gotten it checked.
During the drive to M on
tana, “ I really started to
think about it,” Stride
recalled. “ I got really fearful.
1 thought, ‘If I have let this
go too long, 1 am really going to kick myself.’ ”
Stride went to a clinic in Bozeman to get the
lump checked. She said the nurse practitioner
“was pretty sure it was fine,” hut Stride was sent
to a nearby hospital for a mammogram and an
ultrasound just in case.
After returning home to Portland, her sur
geon told her she was confident the tumor was
malignant.
“She used the term ‘malignant’ about four
times before she used the word ‘cancer,’ ” Stride
said. “They must break you in slowly.
“ I’ve talked to other survivors abut that
moment when you get the news,” she said. “ I
was just so mind-boggled.... I really thought
I was going to die.”
Stride decided at that moment to have a
double mastectomy.
“I had a feeling I’d have it 10 years later in
the other breast,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m only
going to do this once.’ ”
"All the things I need to
feel like a whole person,
to feel happy, to feel
sexy, to feel
my breasts were nowhere
in that equation"
Coventry
Cycle (V W orks
Project ion a l Service
Com fortable Bikeo
RecunibenU a S p ecia lty!
Edward J Mill
\v w\v. H i 11Wre n -1 a\v\ co m
phone: 503.28 1.6.362 fax: 503.288.8046
1826 NE B road way Portland, OR 9723 2 - 1 430
On Dec. 12, a surgeon removed both of
Stride’s breasts, a 5-ccntimeter tumor and 11 of
her lymph nodes. She went through several
months of chemotherapy and seven weeks of
radiation after the surgery.
Stride said the chemo caused her to develop
sores in her mouth and throat. What was more
difficult, she said, was the emotional toll it hx)k
on her.
“They’ll tell you you’ll lose your hair and
you’ll he throwing up, hut there’s so much anxi
ety, so much emotional imbalance,” she said.
"There’s this fear and this misery.”
She said she couldn’t have made it without
the love and support of family and friends, who
did everything from bringing her meals to
changing her cat’s litter box.
Stride’s 38th birthday, April 19, was the day
before her last chemotherapy treatment. She
had planned a small get-
together with her closest
friends, and 24 people
showed up.
“I felt so fortunate,” she said.
“I know people who don’t
have anyone.”
She said doctors and
nurses have told her that peo
ple with a solid support sys
tem ‘‘seem to do better”
— Laura Stride through their treatment.
Stride said she dtxisn’t
feel hitter about getting cancer, and she sees it as
more of a journey rather than a “battle."
“What I find fascinating is that you’ve got to
‘battle’ cancer," said Stride, who describes her
self as a peace activist. “ I was thinking to myself,
in battle and in war, it’s wholly appropriate to he
sleep-deprived, brainwashed. It is appropriate to
operate from a complete place of fear— it’s all
this negative stuff. But the first message my
oncologist gave me is proper nutrition, having
your friends support you.”
Rather than surviving the cancer itself, “the
treatment is what I feel like I survived.”
“You’ve got to have your mind, heart and
soul on the same page," she said. “The chemo, it
works to fracture you."
Less than three months after her last radia
tion treatment, Stride looks anything hut frac
tured. She recently spent six days hackpacking
53 miles through the Eastern Sierras.
On Sept. 19, she and a team of 14 others joined
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