Malinda Dale has the spirit of a fighter. Seven years after being diagnosed with breast cancer, the mother of three still speaks with determination in talking about her battle with cancer.
When doctors discovered a lump in her breast in the spring of 2006, Dale said fear immediately set in but she made a conscious decision to fight the disease with every ounce of strength she had.
“It was so much all at once. You get the diagnosis that you’ve got cancer and the first thing you think is, ‘When am I going to die?’ You hear cancer and you think death because you know so many people who have died of cancer,” Dale said. “Being 34 years old with three kids, I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t leave my kids.’ I couldn’t imagine not being there because, my kids, they’re my life.”
A mammogram and an ultrasound revealed the small lump in her upper right breast was stage two cancer.
“It wasn’t really big but it was big enough,” she said.
The lump was so small, in fact, that Dale could not feel it herself. It was discovered at her annual doctor visit. Dale said she never performed self-breast exams due in part to her young age and the lack of cancer history in her family.
“I was 34 years old, I didn’t really think about that,” she said. “I had no history in my family and it wasn’t really something I thought to do. Most people in their 30s don’t think about it.”
After a biopsy, doctors decided Dale needed a mastectomy. After getting a second opinion, Dale underwent the operation.
“It had to be done,” she said. “That was just the best way. It was a stage where a lumpectomy would not have worked. It was just too big.”
While radiation treatment was required, she did need chemotherapy to ensure the cancer would not return. Despite treatments that “hurt to the bone,” Dale went to every sporting event and school activity her children had.
‘My bones hurt”
“The first four treatments weren’t so bad; they just made me a little sick. But the last four treatments, it felt like I had just been beaten with a bat. My bones hurt. That’s a hard thing to describe. I would lay down and get almost immobile because it hurt so bad,” she said. “I hurt. My body hurt, but that was just part of it. I may have felt like death but I still went (to their events). I don’t think I missed a single one,” she said.
Although many friends offered to help her as she battled through the pain, Dale was determined to do as much as she could on her own.
“If I started depending on people, I was worried I would get complacent, not want to do for myself and not want to fight hard. I had to fight it,” she said.
When she began to lose her hair, Dale wore matching bandannas as her way of controlling what was happening to her body.
“I was trying to feel normal,” she said. “I wanted to be as normal as I possibly could be. Everything else was not normal — I had lost my hair…I wanted my kids to see normalcy so it wouldn’t scare them.”
Through it all, Dale said the support of friends and family is what helped push her through. From dropping off dinners to offering to pick her children up from school, Dale said she received overwhelming support. When she began wearing bandannas, the other mothers on her son’s baseball team began wearing them as well.
While she had friends rally around her, she had other friends who shied away because they didn’t know what to say.
“People didn’t know how to talk to me,” she recalled. “They were scared to talk about it.”
However, Dale said she feels she and other women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer just want to be treated like everyone else.
“I didn’t want anybody to pity me. Make me be a fighter; don’t treat me like I’m different,” she said. “We want to be normal. We don’t want to feel like we’re in that cancer club.”
Shared experiences
While it’s hard to imagine being part of the “cancer club,” Dale said it is an invaluable group of women who support each other in their toughest times.
“Is it a club you don’t want to be a part of, but once you are, you embrace it because you want to be a spokesperson for the next person who is going to be a member, whether they like it or not. It’s OK to be mad as hell about it and ask why. It’s OK. You’re human,. Then you look around and you see what’s positive in your life and you fight for that.”
Dale is now considered cancer free by doctors but since her diagnosis, she has had friends and a grandmother who have been diagnosed and lost their battle with cancer. At her yearly checkup, she said fear still sets in as she wonders if doctors will tell her that her cancer has come back.
“Anxiety sets in and I’m a nervous wreck,” she said. “You’re thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to the doctor, what are they going to find?’ I worry myself like that. Maybe in 10 years, it will be a piece of cake but there is still that level of anxiety there — what are they going to find? Is it going to come back? What if there is maybe one little (that) cell got out and it will go to something else?”
After a moment of doubt, Dale’s fighter spirit takes over and she takes a deep breath.
“I just tell myself to keep calm,” she said. “I’m going to be OK.”
Sarah Fowler covered crime, education and community related events for The Dispatch.
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