Gill Deacon: How a strong wind led to a 2nd recovery from cancer

Gill Deacon is returning to host CBC Radio's Here and Now, which airs from 3-6 p.m. ET on 99.1 FM, on Wednesday following several months away due to cancer treatment. It's the second time Deacon has battled the disease, and she has this story to share about her most recent diagnosis and recovery:

"Cancer is a message. If you don't listen carefully and heed the message, it comes back. Louder."

A nurse once told me that; one of the countless pieces of advice people dispense, unsolicited, when they learn you're going through a health struggle. 

She was changing the dressing on my mastectomy wound at the time, a dreadful gash across my left chest, held together by 27 metal staples. 

I looked away as she worked so I wouldn't see the gore, focusing instead on the crabapple blossoms out the window. It was April 2009.

I'm not sure I believe in the concept, never mind what message my first breast cancer had for me. But if that nurse was right, I must have not heard it. 

August, 2018. A round-the-island swim at a family cottage, an annual tradition. Just before diving in, the wind picked up suddenly, bringing the full force of Georgian Bay waves crashing onto my plan of swimming breast stroke for such a long distance.

To avoid gulping mouthfuls I swam front crawl instead, an unusual choice for me. The route went clockwise around the island, so I pulled harder with my left arm to stay on course. 

By nightfall, on the trip down Highway 400 back to the city, my left underarm hurt. More than a pulled muscle, it felt … odd. Like something was catching. 

Two days later the pain was gone, my doctor couldn't feel anything. She ordered an ultrasound just to be safe, given my history on the left side. 

Unclear ultrasound images lead me back to Princess Margaret Hospital. To the same surgeon who had applied those 27 staples nearly a decade previously. He too felt nothing, but ordered more tests. Just to be safe.

And so it was that I spent last October and November recovering from another surgery, a lumpectomy plus full axillary dissection. That means they took out a chick pea-sized tumour plus all of my lymph nodes. 

Twenty-two staples this time.

I spent December through March doing a wobbly, unpredictable dance with a chemotherapy pole and enough vials of prescription drugs to fill a shopping cart; riding out the winter under blankets, horizontal on my couch. The cold and snow looked pretty through the window. I gather it didn't feel that way outside.

There were visitors: some familiar and beloved, others new; all endlessly kind. 

There was food: some scheduled and organized, some random and surprising; all of it the more delicious for the care and love that went into sharing it with me and my family. There was overwhelming love and support from the community of CBC Radio listeners who I now understand are also family of a different kind. 

I never once felt alone.

Then spring came. The drugs began a slow course of receding, along with the ice and snowbanks. Delicate, wonky sprouts of hair dared peek out of my bare scalp, matched by crocuses in my neighbour's yard. 

I waited to feel all better again, like my old self. And I waited. And waited some more. Where was that full bloom of Gill Deacon? 

Whenever the doorbell rang I froze, waited until I heard footsteps receding down off my porch before moving around the house again. Texts and phone calls went unanswered.

I had done it, finished the hell of cancer treatment and was rounding the corner back to health — why wasn't I rallying?

I call it The Reckoning — as the reality of what has just happened physically begins to sink in mentally. The medical schedule has lightened enough to allow space for questions to swirl — who to be, how to be ... and why? 

The Reckoning is harder than the physical pain and less easier to pinpoint. It's the great coming undone. 

The only thing that seemed to coax my spirits into returning was the clear permission not to. After many weeks of resting, weeping, long walks, meditation, painting, writing and even dancing like no one's watching, I felt a familiar flicker of vigour tugging at my coat tail. 

Ready, let's go. 

Why did a powerful wind pick up, just before that fateful swim? And what if it hadn't? 

No doctor could feel that tumour, no scan could spot it clearly. Only I could tell it was there, and only briefly as a direct result of that clockwise front crawl stroke on a day that had seemed calm as I donned my swimsuit. Otherwise it could have gone many more years undetected. 

Thank you, wind.

I'm so damn grateful to be feeling strong and well and coming back to work, and so thankful for the doctors and nurses who got me here and who continue to monitor me. 

And I'm grateful for the encouragement and invisible friendship of radio listeners across Toronto and beyond. Gratitude might be the buzziest word of the millennium but it's real. And it is mighty.

If it is indeed the lesson of cancer, I'm listening.