Jackie Stevens didn’t expect her first year in remission to be so difficult.
BUCKFIELD – When Jackie Stevens was getting chemotherapy and radiation treatments, she didn’t feel guilty about coming home from work and getting on the couch.
She didn’t mind asking her husband to do the dishes every night.
She didn’t care that it had been months since she pulled up the carpet in her den or that the hardwood floors still weren’t finished.
Nothing mattered. She was sick. She had breast cancer. And that gave her the right to slacken her pace.
It wasn’t until after her treatment was over and the cancer cells had long disappeared that the guilt set in.
“It wasn’t at all like I thought it was going to be,” said Stevens, about her first year in remission. “I thought, ‘OK, I’m over the chemo, over the radiation. Everything is going to go back to normal.'”
Not quite.
Months after her final radiation treatment, Stevens still didn’t feel like doing anything after work. She still relied on her husband to do the cooking, the dishes, the grocery shopping. She still couldn’t fathom the idea of refinishing her floors.
But, instead of feeling entitled, she felt frustrated.
“I kind of had to let things go. But it wasn’t easy,” she said. “I had to let things go the previous year. I was ready to get back to my life.”
Instead, Stevens, a special needs teacher at Hartford-Sumner Elementary School, found herself crying at work over things that never used to bother her – a small problem with a student, a comment from a co-worker.
She was tired.
Life had been hard ever since Oct. 4, 2001. That was the day a routine mammogram detected a 2.5-centimeter lump in her right breast.
Surgery came first. It was followed by eight chemotherapy treatments and 33 radiation treatments. During that time, Stevens lost her hair. Her muscles ached and her appetite wavered as the potent medication did its job.
Then, it was over.
In June 2002, her hair started to grow back. In October of that same year, her mammogram results came back clean. Her doctor told her to consider herself in remission.
Time to redecorate
Still, Stevens felt awful.
After months of waiting to feel normal again, she decided to talk to her primary care physician about going on medication for depression.
Since Stevens hated the idea of taking a pill every day, her doctor recommended that she wait a couple of weeks. The doctor reminded Stevens that it takes a long time to recover from the powerful effects of chemotherapy and radiation. She assured Stevens that her frustrations were normal.
Weeks later, with the arrival of spring 2003, Stevens asked her husband if he wanted to redecorate their computer room and start the floors in the den.
She offered to host and cater her son’s wedding at their Buckfield home, and she stopped worrying that every backache and stomach pain might be cancer.
“This past summer was really, really good,” she said.
These days, Stevens stays late at work at least one day a week to get organized, just as she did before Oct. 4, 2001. She recently completed a master’s level education course. The floors in her den are done, and her computer room is painted a deep red.
Her husband still does most of the cooking and cleaning.
“But I think that is because he actually likes doing it,” Stevens said, grinning.
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