Her Name Was Jane

By Charles E Morgan

Jane wasn't a famous person or even an infamous person.  She wasn't a historical figure that poets write odes about.  She wasn't a celebrity.  She wasn't a politician and she never did anything to save the world.  She was not the person the producers would be standing in line to make a movie about her life.  What she was, for 36 years, up until November 9, 2016, was my wife, the mother of our children, a Grandmother, my confidant, my lover, my best friend and one of the most incredible women I have ever known.

Sometime during the night of November 9, 2016, Jane's nine-year battle with metastatic breast cancer came to an end and with it came the end of a long road that we had traveled together.  A road that neither one of us ever expected to be on nor did we want to be.  But a road we traveled together, no matter what the situation.  A journey that I would not have wished on my worst enemy, but a road that I was glad to have been able to travel with her.

This is the story of one woman's battle with breast cancer as told by her husband and loving companion.  It is a story of love and death but told with humor, sadness, love, and insights into the things that no one ever tells you about as you start this journey. 

If you or someone you know is facing this dreaded disease you will want to read about how one woman and her family dealt with everything the disease could throw at them and how they persevered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles E Morgan
• Release date: Mar 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998873053

Charles E Morgan

Charles Morgan attended Seton Hall University and Regis College and spent thirty-five years as a construction project manager. He is an avid outdoorsman, an Eagle Scout, and a licensed private pilot with a passion for camping, hiking, mountain biking, and fly-fishing. Morgan is the author of Her Name Was Jane, a memoir about his late wife’s nine-year battle with breast cancer. He is also the author of a crime fiction series under the name Chuck Morgan and has published "Crime Interrupted" and "Crime Delayed" as part of that series.  Morgan has three children, two grandchildren, and two dogs. He resides in Lone Tree, Colorado.

Book preview

YOU HAVE BREAST CANCER...

These are probably the most terrifying four words in the English language, or in any language for that matter.  You have no idea until you hear someone tell you those words, how much your life is going to change and how little control you have over the outcome.  We first heard those words in October of 2008.  The weekend was warm and beautiful, and we decided to work in the yard raking leaves.  We had a pretty good pile of leaves going, and Jane decided it was time to show our Grandson Devlin, how much fun it was to play in the leaves.  Devlin was just a shade over a year old, and I remember standing there watching him and her just having a blast kicking and rolling around in the leaf pile.  Laughing the whole time.

That evening as we were getting ready for bed Jane came to me and told me that while she and Devlin were rolling in the leaves, that he had accidentally kicked her in her right breast and it was sore and felt hard like it was bruised and could I check it and see what I thought.  My first reaction when I felt the lump was Oh crap.  I told Jane that I didn’t think the lump and soreness were from the kick and that she needed to call the doctor first thing Monday and get it looked at.  Needless to say, it was a very nervous time waiting to get a doctor visit scheduled. 

I will give you a little hint about things here.  Get used to waiting.  Nothing happens quickly when it comes to cancer and waiting is a big part of that.  It is also the part that will absolutely drive you crazy if you let it.  Waiting for appointments, waiting to have scans, waiting for scan and test results, waiting for the chemo to work, waiting for the adverse reaction and side effects to start and waiting for them to end and then waiting for three months to go by so you can get the next set of tests and scans to see if the chemo is working.  And then it starts all over again.  And all the while knowing that the more you have to wait, the closer you are getting to the possible end of your life.    As hard as this may sound, you have to learn to pace yourself and everything around you.  More importantly, you have to make sure everyone around you also understands the waiting game.  Your friends, relatives, and co-workers all mean well, especially when they know you are going for a test or scan or for another treatment, but their questions can make a bad situation even worse.  Hard as it may sound, relax into it.  You have no control over what happens, so you need to learn to let it happen and then figure out how to deal with it.

Jane saw our family physician that following Monday afternoon and the Doctor immediately scheduled her for another mammogram and ultrasound.  Jane had always been diligent about getting her annual mammogram and tried to be diligent about doing a monthly self-breast exam, and as a matter of fact, her most recent mammogram had only been at the end of August.  What happened next was a little surreal.  Even though the mammogram technician could feel the lump and knew exactly where it was, it didn’t show up in the mammogram.  They had to use an ultrasound to define the lump.  Now here is something we were not aware of.  There is a small percentage of women whose breast tissue is so dense that the mammogram is not as effective at revealing lumps as it might be for other women and that it is recommended that these women have an ultrasound done as well, periodically, just to be safe.  No one ever told us this before that day, and we often wondered if we might have had a better outcome had we known this for the ten years before when she was only getting the mammogram.

With the results of the mammogram and ultrasound in, the Doctor scheduled Jane for a biopsy.  This happened the next day, Tuesday.  That was a very uncomfortable day as we sat around waiting for the results, which we had been told we would get sometime on Wednesday.  Here is that whole waiting part I talked about earlier.

At around 7 PM Tuesday night, the phone rang and caller ID identified it as our Doctor’s office number.  The Doctor had gotten the results just before leaving the office for the night and didn’t want Jane to have to wait for the results.  You have breast cancer.  There they were.  The four most terrifying words anyone could hear, and we had just heard them, and we knew right then and there that our lives would never be the same.  Jane was incredibly calm while she was on the phone with the Doctor, but as soon as she hung up the phone, she broke down in tears.  How could this be happening?  There was no history of breast cancer in Jane’s family, she had never smoked or done drugs.  She’d barely ever had a drink, except in a social situation and then it was never more than one.  There was nothing in her past that would indicate a possibility of having breast cancer.  But she had it.  And now we had to deal with it.

We met with our family Physician the next day to discuss the results.  The ultrasound had actually discovered 2 lumps in her right breast and one in her left.  The one in her left breast was small, but the one we had felt in her right breast was about the size of a walnut.  She conjectured that when Jane and Devlin were rolling in the leaves, and he kicked her right breast, that he had possibly dislodged the lump, which made it visible.  Throughout our long journey, she always held the belief that Devlin was her little guardian angel and had saved her life.  There were not many options available, but the Doctor wanted us to see a surgeon to discuss this further.  She gave us a list of 3 surgeons, all that she recommended very highly.  Jane scheduled an appointment with the first surgeon for the following Friday.

The first and only surgeon we met with was a woman, who was highly regarded by her peers.  She was compassionate but also very direct, and Jane immediately felt comfortable with her.  The assessment was not easy to hear.  Because of the size of the one tumor and the location of the second one in the right breast, she felt the breast had to go.  She could do a lumpectomy on the left breast, but there was no guarantee that there wasn’t more cancer to be found, especially if it was already in her lymph nodes.  She asked us if we wanted to go home to discuss this further, but Jane had heard all she needed to hear. 

One of the things we had discussed on the way over to the Surgeon’s office was that Jane was in charge.  I would be there to help Jane work through options and to serve as a sounding board, but the final decisions were Janes and Janes alone. 

Jane asked the Surgeon if she had a scalpel in her desk that she could use to take both breasts off right then and there.  Her decision was made, and it was final.  The Surgeon would schedule a double mastectomy for the next available date.  There was no turning back now.  The next couple weeks were going to be incredibly busy as we needed to discuss reconstruction and further treatment and vet a bunch of doctors and enlist them in our fight.

BACKGROUND

I first met Jane in October of 1980.  I was working as an Assistant Chief Engineer at one of the airport hotels at the old Stapleton Airport in Denver.  Jane was in the middle of getting a divorce and had separated from her husband and moved into her first apartment in Denver.  She accompanied her soon to be ex-husband to the hotel where he was applying for a job and found out that we were looking for an Engineering Department Coordinator.  This was a brand new position in our department, and we had no job description and no real idea of what the job would entail so we were pretty much looking for someone who could create their own position.  I had walked through the Human Resources Department while Jane was interviewing with my boss and noticed this pretty girl with long dark hair.  At that, I didn’t really pay much attention to her.  My boss hired her, not because of her experience but mostly because she was eager and was very interested in the challenge of creating this new position.

Jane showed up for work the following Monday morning.  She walked into the office and introduced herself to the team, and my first comment was, Why did you cut your hair?  She stood there and looked at me like who are you and how do you know I cut my hair?  I explained that I had seen her in HR the week before.  I have to tell you, that I am not sure if there is such a thing as love at first sight, but there was an instant attraction.  Jane and I worked closely over the next couple weeks to get her office organized and to determine exactly what her job would be. 

Jane was going through a divorce at the time, and my marriage was in the process of failing, and we found comfort in being together.  After just a couple weeks we were together almost constantly, and I soon discovered that the instant attraction I felt from my side was also being felt by her.  We had only been seeing each other a couple weeks when she told me one night that she wanted to have my babies.  This was a shock, but I was also thrilled. 

Jane had spent a lot of time traveling around with her first husband and was very excited to have her own apartment.  It was one side of a duplex with a huge kitchen, and she seemed to revel at making nice meals for us, especially on weekends.  Jane didn’t have a driver’s license at the time so she either took the bus or I ended up taking her wherever she needed to go.  One Saturday, she asked me to take her to the mall so she could get a couple skirts for work.  She found a skirt she liked and while she was in trying it on I had walked around the store looking for other outfits I thought she might like.  When she came out of the changing room to show me the skirt she was trying on I had six more skirts, a couple pairs of pants, and a handful of shirts for her to try on.  The clerk just looked at her, pointed to me and said, This one is a keeper.  I guess Jane agreed with her because we lasted 37 years together.

Jane was incredible at organization and at getting things done, and while she was getting our department organized, she was also preparing her own divorce documents.  Now, this was before computers and the internet, so she had to research how to do her own divorce by taking the bus to the local library and to the office supply store to buy the correct forms.  She had to make sure everything was filled in correctly, get them signed by her Ex and notarized and then appear at divorce court.  All told her divorce took about 6 weeks and cost her about $50 in filing fees and paperwork.  My divorce took 18 months and involved several lawyers and numerous court appearances and cost several thousand dollars.  I should have used Jane as my attorney.

To celebrate her divorce, she invited me over for dinner, and when I walked into the house, a little black puppy was sleeping on a pillow on the couch.  Duchess would be the first of many animals to help fill up our lives. 

Once my divorce was final, we decided it was time to move in together, so we got another dog.  Sundance (Sunny) was part purebred Siberian husky and part something that got over the fence.  She was almost pure white with a curled tail, one blue and one brown eye and had the most awesome personality. 

Our first rental house together was in a nice neighborhood in Aurora, and we set about making it our own.  We lived in that house for 2 years and then we found out that Jane was pregnant.  We were absolutely thrilled by the prospect of becoming parents.  The first thing we did was call a friend of mine who was a realtor, and we started looking for a house of our own.  We finally settled on a house in N Denver that was brand new.  It wasn’t a huge house.  It was a front to back split level with about 800 square feet of finished space on the main floor and 2 bedrooms upstairs and had an unfinished lower level.  Looking back to the early days is funny.  The house we currently own has more windows in the master bedroom than we had in the entire first house.  But this was our house, and we were excited.

But the house wasn’t the only thing we needed to do to become a family, so on the Monday before Memorial Day weekend in 1983 I called Jane up at work and asked her if she had any plans for lunch on Friday.  When she told me she didn’t, I asked her if she would like to get married.  In the following four days, we pulled together a really simple wedding and met two of our friends and