Type A Guide to Survivorship

By Lauren Candies Tarpley

After battling breast cancer in her early thirties, Lauren Candies Tarpley is in her second year of cancer survivorship. With lessons learned and words of wisdom and encouragement to impart, she bares her soul. Exploring the ups and downs of life after cancer, Type A Guide to Survivorship follows Lauren on h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Mar 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798822910782

Lauren Candies Tarpley

At the age of 34, Lauren Candies Tarpley was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. Living as an adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patient, she felt it was important to let others know about the good, the bad, and the ugly. Now as a cancer survivor, she is back to share how she copes with the different set of challenges that comes with survivorship. She is also the author of Type A Guide to Cancer and Too Many Cells.

Book preview

Introduction: And We’re Back…

Hey, y’all. It’s me again. I thought I should come back to finish the story I started in 2020. For those of you just tuning in, let me get you caught up to speed. My name is Lauren, and I was diagnosed with stage II breast cancer at the age of thirty-four, on September 4, 2020. My son, Chip, was a year and a half old, and I hadn’t even been married for three years! I wrote Type A Guide to Cancer to help those who were diagnosed and needed some help through diagnosis and the (breast) cancer journey from a Type A breast friend. In my first book, I cover racial disparities in medicine, grants and how to pay for treatment, and just life during treatment, and give suggestions on questions to ask your doctors during that whole process. If you haven’t read the book, no worries. I’ll pause here so you can order it on Prime and get caught up!

OK, then—now that we are all on the same page, let’s continue! This book is for survivors, people in treatment, and those who surround us. I’m going to tell you about my journey and my truth as I have experienced it over the last two years. I will also have some drop-ins from some breasties—aka some breast (cancer) friends—to talk to you about things that they may know about a little (or a lot) better than I do and that I thought very necessary to touch on.

Before we get into it all, I want to give you two disclaimers. One, I am not a medical professional. This book is not for medical advice. These are my experiences, period. I shouldn’t be around any medical equipment that isn’t being used on myself or that I’m not stealing from an exam room! (For legal purposes…I am kidding.) Two, I will always be honest and convey my feelings. My feelings are just that: my feelings. This is my experience with life (after cancer). It’s not all going to be rainbows, butterflies, and glitter. That comes later, right? Currently this is the cleanup after a storm…it’s a little rainy, and there are caterpillars everywhere, and I can see only one of the tails of the rainbow. But see, that’s how my journey started: messy! I was blindsided over and over.

I had to fight to get a mammogram, because it was at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when all this started for me.

Initially I was told my pain was an ingrown hair.

Then I was dismissed, considered too young to need a mammogram.

Then I was told that my cancer was at stage I.

I told you about how Dr. B. terrified me to within an inch of my life, laying out scenarios of different stages of the cancer. I ask: how was that necessary when this was my first ever doctor appointment regarding cancer and you’d just told me I was stage I?

That was the tone that was set for me and my journey, and I’m trying to break it, but that woman’s words live rent-free in my head. I wish they didn’t, but that was the first cancer experience I had. And I truly resent her for that. I love this second chance I’ve been given, but it’s like there’s always something waiting in the wings, Final Destination-style.

Honesty is often very hard. The truth is often painful. But the

freedom it can bring is worth the trying.

—Fred Rogers

That is my whole reason for writing this book. That is why I can’t and won’t stop until I get the message out of my heart and mind and onto these pages. I want to make sure that I am seen and heard, and I want you to feel that way too. After treatment it is very common and easy to feel invisible. One of my friends read the manuscript for this book before I sent it to the publisher, and she said, I think a few things need to be explained a little more. Someone who hasn’t been through this experience won’t get it. But I like that. I want the friend, family member, or caregiver reading it, who just can’t wrap their mind around something, to reach out to the person they’re reading this book for. I want to get these important conversations started.

Survivorship

They say you’re a survivor from the minute you’re diagnosed. Unpopular opinion alert!!!

Um, no. That’s like saying you’re a graduate the minute you begin school. You have no idea about the challenges, setbacks, or silver linings you’ll experience and learn in treatment and then survivorship. I didn’t feel like a true survivor and on the other side of things until my body healed from my latest surgery and I micro-bladed my eyebrows. It may seem small but that is what makes this whole journey: a collection of important small events to create a sturdy foundation. You’re in a purgatory-like state with maintenance drugs and subsequent surgeries and relearning how this body fits into life as you know it. Not a new normal—a now normal. The person you were before is gone, and the sooner you grieve that loss and learn how to cope with that fact, the better. You may be similar, but it’s definitely different. You look at people, places and things differently. Food tastes different. Words and experiences hit differently.

I published my first book nearly two years ago, and every time I (re)write this book, it’s because I am in a totally different headspace than the last. I have been a very busy girl! I have published three books; I got a new job; we bought a travel trailer; we moved; and I have had seven more surgeries! I know, I know, it’s a lot, but we will get into it. They say idle hands are the devil’s playthings, but it’s really just a trauma response that I am working hard to break. It is very hard, for most, to just sit with your thoughts. That’s why I don’t care for meditating and the like. That is also something that I am working very hard on.

See, that is what survivorship is like. It is a hurricane, and it has rocked me. Wait—or is it more like a tornado? I don’t know—we have more hurricanes here in South Carolina. And I have never heard a song about a tornado; I am sure there are some, but none are as good as the one from The Scorpions (fight me), so I will go with hurricane.

To me, survivorship is harder than going through treatment. When you’re diagnosed, your medical team knows what to do. There is a finite number of treatment options, and you go on your way of surgeries, radiation, chemo, immunotherapy, et cetera—your personal combination of those. Survivorship is different. Survivorship is as individual as the person going through it. It’s not as black and white as targeting the cancer and getting it out of your body. There is a whole mental aspect