“Somewhere the hurting must stop.”

– Terry Fox

I took the photo above one day after learning I had Stage 3 Her 2 Triple Positive Breast Cancer. After a night of no sleep due to an overabundance of fear for my future, I decided to go for a walk to the one place that I thought would give me some peace, Lake Ontario at sunrise. Hearing the waves crashing and witnessing the everyday miracle of a gorgeous sunrise had its intended effect. I felt hope and the stirring of an unexpected feeling, in spite of my circumstances. Gratitude! To be alive on this beautiful day.

Today, on World Cancer Day, I felt this same sense of hope and gratitude when I had the good fortune to attend a live stream event hosted by the Terry Fox Foundation. After 45 years and almost one billion dollars raised for cancer research, the Foundation announced that Terry’s dream of a future without cancer is closer to being realized with the launch of the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network. For the first time in Canada, cancer research centres across the country have united to form a network of research knowledge sharing that will ensure innovations in cancer research accelerate. Their goal? To improve survivorship by fostering patient-centred, precision treatments that remove barriers to access and reduce the side-effects of current cancer treatment. A true reflection of Terry’s legacy of hope!

Please watch this powerful announcement where you will see that your greatly appreciated donations over the years have built the foundation for a hopeful future of a world without cancer.

This disease has sadly touched all of us and I cannot thank you enough for your generous support each year as I participate in Terry’s Run, and especially these past two years when the battle became personal. As you can see, I have not written a post here in my favourite story-telling space, for a a few years. I was too astonished and worn out to frame this story. But a year ago a dear friend asked me to share my journey with cancer with her congregation. She asked if I could speak about the impact of Terry’s legacy on how I faced my battle with cancer. Here is the story I shared that day. It is called, What Would Terry Do?

I was 11 years old when Terry started his Marathon of Hope. His courage touched my young and impressionable heart deeply. In fact, he touched our whole family and we wept together when Terry passed away the next year, his Marathon ready to be taken up by all of us who loved him so. I remember like it was yesterday when our family took a day off work on the farm to participate in the very first Terry Fox Run in Canatara Park in Sarnia, Ontario. And as you can see from the images above, I have participated in many runs since, even in Terry’s hometown of Port Coquitlam, when I lived in British Columbia.

For me, the last photo on the bottom right is especially poignant. For the first time, I was unable to finish Terry’s 10K on the Beaches boardwalk on that day in September, 2022. At the 2K mark I started to get dizzy and had to find a park bench to sit on. When I didn’t feel any better, I turned around and walked slowly home. I would not know it at the time, but I was pretty sick. In the spring I had my regular mammogram and this one revealed a trouble spot that sent me to St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto for a series of tests throughout the spring and summer to rule out breast cancer. A biopsy in June did just that. No sign of cancer! I felt immediately relieved but my doctor recommended we dig deeper just in case, and ordered an MRI. That led to a “preventative” lumpectomy in early October. For some reason, no alarm bells were going off for me, ever the nervous patient, so when the surgeon requested an in-person visit to discuss the pathology results, (on Halloween of all days), I hopped on the streetcar downtown, not expecting to hear those dreaded words…

“You have cancer.”

You could have blown me over with a feather. My surgeon explained that I had a very aggressive form of breast cancer that had gone from no evidence of cancer in June to not one but two cancerous tumours in October. Both were over 5 cm’s by then. He explained that Her2 positive breast cancer was both aggressive, but also responded well to chemotherapy and immunotherapy. He assigned me an Oncologist and a Nurse Navigator and left the room. I would see him again in the spring for more surgery.

By that Friday I had met my Oncologist who answered the tough question, what stage am I? Due to the size of the tumours and her suspicion that the cancer had already spread to my lymph nodes, she confidently said Stage 3. More stunned silence on my end. She mentioned medical terms like adjuvant and neo-adjuvant, FEC-DH (my chemotherapy regimen for the next 5 months) and laid out a plan of attack that would aggressively meet cancer head on. It would start the next week with a series of tests to see if the cancer had spread. She then felt under my right armpit (ouch!) and made a tsk tsk sound and said she would see me again before my first round of chemotherapy. Thankfully I had a dear friend with me on this visit who took copious notes, asked questions I was incapable of asking, and gave me a bracing hug before we parted. The next morning I took the sunrise photo above and started my plan to fight back. Where did I start?

What would Patti do? She would READ cancer away! The local Eaton’s Centre Indigo benefitted from my blunderbuss approach to buying their whole self-help section on cancer. I spent the weekend reading but very quickly found that I was not ready for self help. These books did not speak to me in those very early, overwhelmed and scared days. So I turned to my own bookshelf and my long-time trusted friend and now mentor, Terry Fox, to navigate how to approach cancer with grace and gumption. Like my closet-full of Terry Fox Run t-shirts, I have also acquired and devoured every book written about Terry. Here is what was thankfully on my shelf:

Terry: Terry Fox and His Marathon of Hope, by Douglas Coupland, is a DK-like scrapbook of Terry’s run memorabilia collected by his siblings and friends during and after his run. Forever Terry: A Legacy in Letters came out in 2020 for the Marathon of Hope’s 40th Anniversary and is a powerful and moving collections of letters Canadians have written to and about Terry over the years. Many of the quotes in this essay come from this book and I cannot recommend it enough. Lastly, Leslie Scrivener wrote Terry Fox: His Story just after Terry passed away. Leslie was the Toronto Star reporter who followed Terry on his run in Ontario. It is a thoughtful and moving account of that wonderful, tough summer of 1980, when we all fell in love with a young man named Terry Fox.

After re-reading these three books, taking notes along the way, I formed a recipe for survival that I would follow in the coming months to the letter. Together with the support and love of family and friends, Terry’s journey inspired me to live each day with hope. What other choice did I have? Here’s what I learned from Terry.

“All the support I had from other people really helped me, knowing that all those people cared. That and being really competitive. I decided I was going to beat it and get off my butt and show these people what I could do, and that I appreciated them coming to see me and that I was not all sad and gloomy. So I decided to do my very best.”

– Terry Fox in Terry Fox: His Story by Leslie Scrivener

“I don’t feel this is unfair. That’s the thing about cancer. I’m not the only one, it happened all the time to people. I’m not special. This just intensified what I did. It gives it more meaning. It will inspire more people. I just wish people would realize that anything is possible if you try.”

– Terry Fox in Terry Fox: His Story by Leslie Scrivener

“I miss Terry, and our society suffered a great loss when he passed away. But he left us so much. Terry was an ordinary Canadian with extraordinary determination and a passion to make a difference. He had something in him that we all have within ourselves: hope.

– Rick Hansen in Forever Terry: A Legacy in Letters

My dear sister Jen, also a breast cancer survivor, and a fabulous nurse, recommended that I pick up a daytimer that would help me keep all of my medical appointments straight over the coming months. So along with all of the Indigo books, I picked up this small orange daytimer and found some appropriately cheerful stickers to decorate it for the times I needed a boost. “What’s the Best that Could Happen” became my mantra and I said it until I believed it! I needed to. Here’s the cover, and that first few weeks after diagnosis.

Those first two weeks of November I lived at St. Michael’s Hospital! From an Echocardiogram to ensure my heart could take the rigours of chemotherapy, to a variety of CT scans to ensure the cancer hadn’t spread, to day surgery the next week to insert a port-a-cath or port, just below my throat to make taking chemo easier than the ravages of IV’s. Two days later I had my first chemotherapy treatment. The FEC in FEC-DH. Very toxic chemicals! Two of the three seemed simple enough once I took my anti-nausea medication. Clear fluid in a slow drip into my port. But the third…my chemo nurse entered my pod decked out in an extra gown, face shield and long gloves and held two red liquid-filled syringes at arm’s length. It took one second for me to think “Hang on, you don’t want this touching you but you are about to put this INSIDE me?” I just closed my eyes and held my breath. I wasn’t quite ready for wondering what the best that could happen would be, but I survived this first round with a little grace and some gratitude. And hope that this stuff would work!

The following week I met my Radiation Oncologist from Princess Margaret who would take me to the treatment finish line in the spring. We made a plan and he wished me good luck and see you on the other side. I would then have another surgery to place a clip in my right breast where the lumps were removed. This was also a hopeful act as it assumed that the chemo would make finding the original cancer sight difficult should I need surgery in the spring. I also had a biopsy of my lymph nodes and my Oncologist was unfortunately correct. Cancer had spread to two of them already. These and six other lymph nodes would be removed in the spring. Lastly, I met with the Genetics Team at Mount Sinai to start an investigation into whether this cancer was hereditary and what that might mean. I sure needed that daytimer!

“As I went through the 16 months of the physically and emotionally draining ordeal of chemotherapy, I was rudely awakened by the feelings that surrounded and coursed throughout the Cancer Clinic. There were the faces with the brave smiles, and the ones who had given up smiling. There were the feelings of hopeful denial, and the feelings of despair. My quest would not be a selfish one. I could not leave knowing these faces and feelings would still exist, even though I would be set free from mine. Somewhere the hurting must stop.”

– Terry Fox in Forever Terry: A Legacy in Letters

Some may wonder what drove Terry to run a marathon a day (a marathon a day!!). This one quote sums up Terry’s motivation to run and find a cure for cancer. Chemotherapy is hard! Not as hard as when Terry experienced it, but still so very tough. It is tiring. Your hair falls out! And you meet others sharing your journey who you learn to care about deeply. Their survival feels tied to yours. Below is a a photo of a young man I met during my second round of chemo. He was 27 and worked in the film industry. He just had his port put in and was clearly tired and hurting but putting on a brave face. When his girlfriend left to pick up some snacks, he looked over at me and shared a bit of his story. He had symptoms that he ignored because he believed he was too young to get cancer. By his first treatment on this day, his cancer had spread quite far and he had the look of someone who knew he was in for a battle. To keep it light I asked where he got his fantastic socks, and if I could take a photo, one of the few I took during treatment. My dear sister Jen immediately got me a pair and on rough days, I still wear them! I think of this young man often and wonder how he is.

For my part, I think the hardest part of treatment was indeed losing my hair. They tell you that you will likely lose it quite quickly two weeks after your first treatment. But just like that river in Egypt, I thought, like many before and after me, that I would be the rare one that managed to keep my red locks. No such luck. Right on time, two weeks after my first chemo infusion, my head got hot and itchy. I noticed hair trails around my house. And on Sunday, December 4th, while fixing my ponytail scrunchy, my whole ponytail came off in my hand (!). I screamed and threw it across the room. Wouldn’t you?

And then I proceeded to have my first “wig-out” (pardon the pun) where I grabbed my brush and brushed my head like a maniac until most of my hair laid in a pile in my bathroom sink. I was incensed! About everything. The next day I donned a winter hat and went uptown to the nearest hairdresser and got my head shaved. If you want evidence that there are angels among us, my hairdresser was a recent breast cancer survivor and we cried together as the rest of my red rat’s nest fell to the floor. She showed me the compassion I needed on that very tough day and I have appreciated that moment ever since. On a side note, I went into this looking very much like my red-headed Mum, but left the hairdresser’s looking the spitting image of my Dad! All I needed was a pipe and some Old Chum tobacco to finish the look 🙂

“One of Terry’s secrets was that he set small goals for himself. He didn’t think about running ten miles when he set out in the morning. Instead he ran one mile at a time. ‘I broke it down. Get that mile down, get to that sign, get past that corner and around that bend. That’s all it was. That’s all I thought. I didn’t think of anything else.'”

– Terry Fox in Terry, Douglas Coupland

This lesson, good not only for cancer treatment but for life in general, helped me immensely. My cancer journey was to include 6 chemotherapy treatments, a double mastectomy and 15 rounds of radiation. If I thought about things this way, I would have shut my door and stayed home! Instead, I just thought about the next appointment, the next milestone, and on some days, the next hour when I will feel good again. I had to! An energetic, avid adventurer BC (before cancer), I was astonished that by March, I could barely make it around the block on my daily walks! But I did it anyway. “Get past that house. Then the next one. One more step to my porch.” By March I completed chemo. By May I had recovered from surgery and could plan for the last step, radiation at Princess Margaret.

“Terry Fox was ours and we claimed him from coast to coast to coast and we have never been prouder. I cried for a week after he died. I felt like I knew him, like we went to school together and drank beer down by the river and rode bikes around the block and swam at the local pool until we could hardly keep our eyes open. Terry let us all feel like he belonged to us. Unselfish. Transparent. Altruistic. I am so grateful that I was alive to serve witness to this young man’s life.”

– Jann Arden in Forever Terry: A Legacy in Letters

Leave it to Jann Arden to articulate so well how we all feel! Gratitude is such a powerful gift if we remember to practice it! I can honestly say I did practice it throughout that long winter battling cancer. I had a LOT to be grateful for! Family who reached out, visited and prayed for me. Friends who made hats, blankets, meals, or visited me in the depths of winter for a socially distant cup of tea on my front porch. I felt surrounded by love and grateful to be alive. I kept a gratitude journal and by reading through it I learned that it is the simple things that bring us happiness and joy. Trust me on this one!

I am happy to report, as this long story long nears it’s end, that just before starting radiation at Princess Margaret, I learned that this time, my pathology report from surgery bore amazing news! Complete response, or NED (no evidence of disease). I was finally in remission, and celebrated by taking in the Canada Day fireworks at Ashbridge’s Bay just prior to my last radiation treatment. In that last week of taking the streetcar to Princess Margaret I started to notice my surroundings after living in a bubble for so long. I finally noticed a mural on Dundas Street called “Today’s a Gift”. I can safely say I had a wee cry and said Amen!

“When he started the Marathon of Hope – his dream of running across Canada twenty-six miles a day, one day at a time – I’m sure he had no idea he was creating a legacy that would continue to inspire us forty years later. But he knew if he sat on the sidelines, nothing would happen. So that has been his message to me, and what I like to share with others: if you get involved and choose to move forward, even in the smallest way, you can make a difference. We can all volunteer, help a neighbour, or pay it forward in some way. That’s what Terry Fox taught me, and I’ll be forever grateful.”

– Darryl Sittler in Forever Terry: A Legacy in Letters

When I finally finished treatment my first thought was how on earth can I pay survivorship forward? How can I make a difference even in some small way? Participating in the Terry Fox Run that fall felt like a first step in recovery. And for the first time, I would proudly wear the red run shirt as part of Terry’s Team. I am wearing that shirt today as I type this post.

“I remember promising myself that should I live I would prove myself deserving of life.”

– Terry Fox, Terry Fox Foundation

Dear Terry. You were so deserving of life! And you have made life possible for so many! Thank you! Thank you!

Terry Fox started a marathon against cancer. Together we can end it! Please visit the Terry Fox Foundation website to learn more about where our research dollars go to help fund the cure for cancer. Be sure to watch an empowering new video launched today that may move you to tears. Or please donate if this is possible for you. Know that every dollar counts. You are saving a life. Including mine!

Thank you for reading!