Building Mountains from Dust: A Memoir

By Kimberly S. Young

In Building Mountains from Dust, Kimberly Young shares her story of survival and inspiration. At fifty, Kimberlys structured, organized, and driven life is thrown into a tailspin when she is diagnosed with advanced staged lung cancer. Never a smoker, Kimberly makes frank reflections about her decision not to have children, and how she makes peace with her mother, who abandoned her over fifteen years ago. This is a story about heart-wrenching life lessons, forgiveness, and about finding faith, as in a tragic twist of fate, Kimberly survives her cancer when her husband of twenty years suddenly dies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546237617

Book preview

PROLOGUE

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

- Albert Camus

As Stevie Nicks in the lyrics of Landslide would say, But time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I’m getting older, too. Oh, I’m getting older, too. I went from feeling young and healthy, almost invincible, to feeling old and ill within one day. I went from planning my retirement in 15 years, to wondering if I would live for another year. I watched those who I considered my best friends disappear quickly from life after I was diagnosed with cancer, but saw new friends rally to my side, driving me to scans and treatment appointments. It was an incredible experience. This last year, my structured, organized, and driven life was thrown into a tailspin.

At first, I felt sorry for myself. I was in shock. I was scared. I didn’t want to die. This isn’t a story about my battle with cancer alone, although anyone who has been diagnosed with a life-changing illness can relate to the fear, confusion, and sudden thrust into the medical world. It is a story of self-discovery, as I thought about my step-father, who raised me and died of pancreatic cancer. I didn’t understand then what he had gone through. Watching from the outside was significantly different than living through it.

As my friend Barbara, a 78-year-old survivor of nine bouts of cancer, once said to me, It is God’s Will that you had to come off the mountain. My life was happy. I loved my husband, my three West Highland terriers, being a psychologist, my job as a professor at St. Bonaventure University, my research on Internet addiction and traveling all over the world sharing my experiences on the impact of technology on our society and families. I loved my life; it was perfect. I was sitting on the mountain until all of this.

I thought about my mother. As an only child, I wondered why she had abandoned me for 15 years and why she had no interest in my life. I had rekindled some kind of relationship, while distant, with her before I was diagnosed. For some reason, the phone call to her was the hardest I had to make.

When I look back on this last year and all that I had accomplished, I was pleased with the way my life had turned out at 50. I really was happy. I didn’t want that taken away. I was a fighter and writing this book became my therapy. Looking at all the things that made me who I was – the first in my family to go to college and become a person who toured the world speaking about her passion, I became reflective with each chemotherapy and each radiation treatment. I thought about the choices I had made as a woman, waiting to get married and not wanting children as I was afraid I would make the same mistakes as my mother.

As I write, I continue to wait to see if I am in remission, and that is okay. I discovered that I can be still be happy. I can enjoy the simple things in life. I have experienced what God wanted me to learn -- that His Plans are not my plans. There is a higher purpose that we all need to find. In sickness, I found my character. I found my faith. I have been reborn physically and spiritually, and I have finally found peace and hope for a future.

CHAPTER 1

The Moment

November 11, 2015 -- No one prepares you for the day, the moment, when your entire life changes. The doctor, a good friend, looked me in the eyes. This isn’t what I expected. You don’t show any signs.

The mass on my lungs was large, quite large. I should have been sick, more than the little cough that I had had for weeks. Before the X-ray and the CT scan, the doctor thought it was post nasal drip or GERD tossing up acid in my throat and making me cough. Never would it be from a large mass in my chest.

This isn’t what I expected, Dr. Ambuske repeated. You are a 50-year-old, healthy, nonsmoking female. This clinically isn’t what we see. This isn’t what he expected? This isn’t what I expected!

The moments after are a blur. My husband was getting a blood test at the outpatient lab next door in the main part of the hospital. Jim had his own health problems. He had just finished radiation for prostate cancer. He also had surgery for a pelvic aneurism a few years ago, and survived. And he had a pacemaker and getting his weekly bloodwork for the blood thinner he has been on for years.

He walked in the office waiting room while I was inside with the doctor. Dr. Ambuske kept repeating how clinically there was a disconnect. I don’t present like I have cancer – he discussed that I now needed a lung biopsy to determine what the tissue was and I needed a PET scan to see if it had spread and from where it might have originated.

I took in the medical information but it was a blur. I cried when I saw Jim. We hugged as I sobbed. Still, the disbelief. I had been golfing a week before, walking a large golf course and carrying my bag. The weather was atypical for November in Bradford.

It was warm and sunny, so I was enjoying every free minute on the golf course. Before this moment, my biggest concern was improving my putting and chipping, where all my strokes were going.

Why me? Why now? I am only 50. I am too young to die. These thoughts raced through my mind. I am too young to die. There is so much I wanted to still do.

Ann, the doctor’s wife and one of my close friends came into the room. As she closed the door, I ran over to hug her, still sobbing. Trying to get a grip on my new reality. Trying to avoid the shock – why me?

She was trying to get the PET scan scheduled. It would be 10 days. Ten days! I wanted the scan now, I wanted this thing out of my body. Now!

I was trying to stand on my own – after hugging Jim and Ann so hard – I finally sat back in the chair. The doctor kept saying that he needed the biopsy to confirm the diagnosis. I just had a colonoscopy last week and my surgeon said I was good for another 10 years. Jim was the one with health problems. Twenty years older than me, he was the one who had a heart attack, bypass surgery, a pacemaker, a pelvic aneurysm, and a bunch of procedures from a heart ablation to a cardioversion. It did not add up. It wasn’t how either Jim or I planned this – I was too young, too healthy and too active.

There was nothing more to say, things needed to be set in motion. I needed to schedule the biopsy and the PET scan. I had few other health problems. At 50, we all have something, but up until that moment, my biggest worry was some high cholesterol for which I started to take some medicine but otherwise, I was generally strong and healthy. This was a test.

Jim and I left the doctor’s office. He asked me what I wanted to do next. I just wanted to go home. I wasn’t sure where else to go, I didn’t want to deal with people from work. I didn’t want to deal with myself at that moment.

Jim drove me home. He wanted to sit with me. I said no, he didn’t need to, I was okay being alone. I think I needed to be alone. Jim was a Eucharistic minister. He gave the host to all the nursing homes in the area and to those too old or sick to get to church on Sundays. I knew that he had his route this morning for the Pavilion, the nursing home at the hospital. I didn’t want them to miss seeing him or to miss taking communion. Jim was a life-long Irish Catholic and had been serving his church as a Eucharistic minister for over 30 years. He was a saint not only to me but to others.

He dropped me off in the driveway and asked me again if I wanted him to sit with me.

No, I said. I would be alright.

I entered the house and collapsed on the floor when I saw my dogs. Three wonderful balls of love that meant so much to me at this moment. They jumped on me like they do each day, like it was any other day, and Cassie even brought me a toy, growling with happiness to see me and her tail wagging. I was on my knees as they gave me puppy kisses. I almost forgot about the doctor and my tumor – almost -- but then I started to cry.

Nothing felt normal. This could be cancer. What else could it be? My vanity kicked in. At 50, I looked good for my age. I had thick curly black hair, wasn’t overweight, didn’t have wrinkles, and could easily pass for someone in my 30s. I was still asked for ID once in a while when ordering a drink at a bar. How would chemo change me? What would it do to my hair and to my looks? We see these cancer patients all the time, they just look sick. How would this change me? What if I die?

I had to shake off these thoughts. I stood up, grabbed my tea pot, and boiled some water. Sitting at my kitchen table, I drank a cup of tea. I felt slightly better. Then, my cell phone rang. Ann from Dr. Ambuske’s office called. The surgeon, my friend, another golfer who I frequently saw on the course, was going to do a bronchoscopy, a form of a lung biopsy.

We can schedule it as early as Friday, Ann said as she confirmed the appointment with Dr. Gonzalez for 2:30 PM.

My cell phone rang again, it was the surgeon’s office, Kim?

Linda? it was Dr. Gonzalez’s office manager.

I am sorry honey, where are you? Can you get down here now? Linda asked. We had a cancellation and I thought we could get you in sooner.

That works. I am just sitting in my kitchen drinking a cup of tea, trying to wrap my head around all of this.

Of course you are, Kim. I am so sorry.

I grabbed my keys and headed to the hospital. I didn’t even think to call Jim, I wanted to get in front of the doctor as fast as I could. Driving was hard, I felt so preoccupied, so scared.

You know it is bad when they take you immediately in spite of a waiting room full of people.

As the nurse took my blood pressure, I started to cry, I smoked a little in graduate school with my friends, but nothing major.

I did too, who didn’t? she reassured me. What caused this mass to be in me?

The surgeon knocked and entered with his laptop in his hand. After closing the door, he put the laptop on the counter next to him, stood there with his arms open. I stood up and started to sob, I can’t tell you how much the hug meant – both good and bad. I knew he had seen the scans, he knew the mass intimately now, he wasn’t reading a radiologist report, he had seen my insides. He knew it was bad. I became more frightened.

Now to work, he said, releasing me.

We sat down together. He showed me an x-ray from five years ago. I had forgotten that I had some rib pain. It was nothing. My lungs and chest were clear. The images were good. Then, next it was the scan taken the day before my moment.

There was a large mass – it looked like maybe 4 to 5 inches on the x-ray. Then, the CT scan, gave more depth. It was large and near my heart. I wished that I hadn’t seen it but it was locked in my photographic memory. No, this isn’t happening.

We needed to schedule the biopsy, he was adding me to his surgeries the next day. It was Friday the 13th – that is all I really remember. I tried not to dwell on that too much.

A bad omen, something else to worry about. No, I could not do this to myself, I had to toughen up, I had to get through the next day without fear.

I came home, had another cup of tea. I didn’t really know what to do. Go to work. Stay normal. Stay functional. That is what I told myself.

I drove to St. Bonaventure. Thank God my boss walked down to my office. I couldn’t pretend but I didn’t want to say hello to all the faculty who were wandering down the hallway, checking their email, laughing, advising students, as if life was forever, as if they hadn’t any other worries. I couldn’t pretend. I was sick. I could die. We all could die, but now I had a reason to worry about when.

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My dean, Dr. Pauline Hoffmann (she always joked, Mean, Dean Pauline, which she wasn’t – she was the nicest person and the best boss I ever had) sat in front of my desk, as she had a thousand times. I didn’t know what to say.

I came from my dean’s meeting, Pauline said. She rambled on about the meeting – as we normally would do – joking about the silliness of decision-making at the university and the pointlessness