[00:00:00] Adam Walker: From Susan G Komen, this is Real Pink, A podcast exploring real stories, struggles, and triumphs related to breast cancer. We’re taking the conversation from the doctor’s office to your living room.
[00:00:17] This is Real Talk, a podcast conversation where we’re digging deep into breast cancer and the realities patients and survivors face every day. We’re talking openly and honestly about just how difficult breast cancer can be from being diagnosed to selecting the right treatment plan, to living day-to-day with metastatic breast cancer and life after a treatment ends.
[00:00:37] Life changes in a split second when you hear the words you have. Breast cancer. Shauna Bramble and Marian Santos know this personally. Shauna was diagnosed after having her first child completely upending her family’s plans for more children. Marian was diagnosed at a time when she should have been thinking about her future, planning a family and focusing on preserving her reproductive health.
[00:01:01] Both ladies struggled mentally, emotionally, and physically with their diagnosis and are joining us today to share more. So, Shauna, let’s start with you. We wanna hear your story, and then when you finish Marion, we’d like for you to introduce yourself and share your story as well.
[00:01:16] Shawna Bramel: Thank you, Adam, for having us today to share our stories.
[00:01:20] I feel like even though all of our journeys are different. We all get it and we know the devastating feeling when you hear you have cancer, it changes you in a sudden instant forever, in ways that you’ll never know and you’re still continuing to figure out and trying to comprehend everything too.
[00:01:45] For me in my story, I was 35 years old, just married. A few years prior my daughter was one years old at the time of my diagnosis. We just had bought a bigger house to expand our family because we wanted to have more children. So we had a lot of life events going on at that time. I had just finished breastfeeding my daughter, who was about 13 months old at the time, and I had found a lump in my breast.
[00:02:19] My doctors felt like it was hormones or breastfeeding or a clogged milk duct. Again, it’s something that you never think could happen to you, especially at a young age of 35 and going through all these major life events that were our dream come true for getting married, getting the house, and having our first daughter.
[00:02:46] I work a medical social worker in a hospital. And so normally I help patients who are sick or who have illnesses. So when I got my diagnosis, I was instantly on the patient side of things like needing treatment and support. And that was a big reality check of trying to figure out what’s going on with everything, you know?
[00:03:09] And it’s almost like we were thrown into survival mode. We never had a chance to really understand what was going on. It’s, I always describe it as like being thrown into the ocean. You’re looking for land every day and safety every day for all of the months and months of treatment that I went through, and then the after effects of having lifelong trauma and grief and mental health and side effects.
[00:03:44] It was a lot to go through going through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and the whole gamut. And my oncologist felt like You’re young. We’re just gonna throw everything at you, be aggressive about it and treat it the best way that we could. So instantly we were in survival mode and trying to.
[00:04:12] Stay above water for the whole time of treatment. And it was more towards the end of treatment where everything just hit me like a ton of bricks and trying to emotionally process everything that happened, the grief, the mental part of it, the physical part of it. It was a lot to handle towards the end.
[00:04:32] So it is challenging in terms of. Having your fairytale future and your dreams that you wanna have. Me and my husband have always wanted to have at least two children or more, and it just feels like in a split second, our dreams were just shattered. And having to learn to rewrite it in a new way was, and still is challenging to this day.
[00:04:58] So I know there’s a lot that we’ll talk about here today about that too, but Marion. How is your story or what is going on?
[00:05:11] Marian Santos: I’m Marian Santos, so the same age as Shauna. I was also diagnosed about five days before my 35th birthday last year. Getting the diagnosis was one of the hardest. I’ve had to go through because once you hear the news your test came back and you have cancer, you, it kind of just puts your body in shock.
[00:05:41] Like, do I laugh? You know, do I laugh? Do I cry? Do I, do you, you start to question things that goes on in your life, like, what did you do wrong for you to be affected with this disease? And especially knowing that I did the genetics testing. You know, none of my family, I’m the first in my family to get diagnosed with breast cancer.
[00:06:07] It was it was a really hard fe to go through. And my, I like to keep things very private. So when I first got diagnosed, I didn’t tell my family for a while. I think I told them after. Two or three months after my diagnosis because when I wanted to go through and tell them without worrying them.
[00:06:39] So I got told that I had breast cancer, and then my wife and I just started with a process. Okay, how do we go through this with each other? How do we not stress ourselves? How do we not stress our family with this news? So we started the planning procedure. So January got diagnosed, I think March is when I had my procedure.
[00:07:11] So it was definitely, a life changing event. It I’m glad I had a really good set of doctors behind me where they guided me through the process medically, but emotionally and mentally, it doesn’t really get easy, especially when it comes to all the things you have to do after your surgery.
[00:07:42] Even getting into surgery, you know, I try to keep a positive outlook in life and going into surgery, like, okay, filling out those forms. What do you wanna do after if something happens to you? Those are the things that you don’t think about when you’re at 35 years old, you know? But that was my story in finding out.
[00:08:07] I had the, I had breast cancer. But being a survivor really is a it’s such a relief to say I’m a breast cancer survivor. And I think more women should be aware of how breast cancer, they should always do their daily checks. You know, because me, I didn’t know that I had it. I always felt a lump.
[00:08:36] I didn’t really take that lump seriously until I had discharge. So that was after your diagnosis. Everything is like, where is my next doctor’s appointment? Because there they’re just all together. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:09:00] Shawna Bramel: Yeah. It’s so hard to take it all in the beginning and I always felt like the toughest time for me was during radiation, which was my last part of treatment because I feel like the whole beginning was like this trauma and shock and survival mode and you’re running off high cortisol levels and you can’t even really under like process mentally what was going on and it wasn’t towards the end.
[00:09:30] It wasn’t until the end of my treatment where it just hit me, like all the emotions flooded my brain, and I’m trying to process everything that just happened and what the new normal is gonna be. And it’s just, it’s such like a grieving process too, of going through the stages of grief. And in the beginning I remember just being so angry.
[00:09:58] The denial, the bargaining, like, why me? Like you said, it’s why did this happen to me? What’s the purpose of this? And then it’s trying to get to the place of somewhat being in reality or trying to accept it or trying to get some control over it and figuring out what do I have control over? What can I do about the situation?
[00:10:24] And I feel like the grief still. It comes and goes now too, where I kind of jump around with what’s going on because you, you try to get through the immediate treatment and then it’s another big thing to realize the lifelong effects of it. You know it’s a part of you forever. It changes your future plans and it changes your normal.
[00:10:52] I don’t know what normal is, but you know, you’re trying to figure it out what your new normal is gonna be. Because like everyone has their fairytale expectations of what they want their life to be and marriage or kids or whatever the goals are. And it’s just changed in such a split, split second. And in the beginning it was a lot of grief around like.
[00:11:20] Losing stuff, like I always felt like the cancer was taking away, like things from me. Like it took away my roles like as a mother and a wife and a social worker, because I couldn’t do those roles completely how I wanted them to be. Like it took away my new, my normal. That was normal for me. It took away like my future self of everything I had planned for.
[00:11:49] It affected my fertility to have future children. It took away part of my breasts that I was, had nursed my daughter with. It took away my hair. So it’s losing everything that you had worked so hard for to create. And then you have this huge fear of like what the future would hold and like look like.
[00:12:11] And it just changes in such a. You know, I don’t know how it was for you too.
[00:12:20] Marian Santos: It definitely does. Every, I tell you, every time I take my pill once a day, I grief. Just because I know the effect that it’s, you know I feel the effect that it’s doing to my body. I know the long-term effect it’s going to do to my body.
[00:12:37] So I even asked my doctor, I was like, can I stop this pill because I want to get pregnant the same time as my wife is? And she’s like you can do this other treatment, which is harsher. But essentially you can’t because you have that chance of the cancer coming back. So the pill or you know, the cancer, basically that’s a really tough pill to swallow.
[00:13:10] You know, so that every night taking that medicine, it’s a grieving process. It’s like, do I really wanna take this? I don’t wanna take this the side effects that comes with it. You know who would’ve thought we would be having hot flashes at 35? Exactly.
[00:13:29] Shawna Bramel: I know. And I always describe it as like PTSD, like it’s a trauma, it’s a medical trauma we went through and it can hit us at any moment too, like.
[00:13:42] For me, some of them is like the sounds of the beeping IV pulse, if I hear that, or the smell of alcohol wipes from when I went through treatment or, the one thing too is even like Coco Melon on tv, that was what my daughter was watching when I was going through all of my treatments, and so all of these reminders are just like reminders of all that.
[00:14:07] Trauma we went through and the fear, the grief, like you said too. And it’s hard to put in place like coping skills to get through that. And you, I did over time get more tools in my toolkit from my support to get through it and to try to figure out what that future would be, because like you said too.
[00:14:33] It affected my fertility and I was also in a medically induced menopause state, which the menopause still comes and goes. And so the doctors have told me, you know, you may or may not have children still, there’s different options like IUI or IVF or things like that too, which everything has risks or benefits also.
[00:14:59] And there are big decisions that I never thought I would have to face those or plan for it and say, is this risk or benefit of this pill? Like gonna help or do more harm? And there are decisions that you never think that you’ll have to cross that bridge and make those. And then here you are. I don’t wanna let my dreams of my future get away because I still want children.
[00:15:25] But how does it look now? And it’s kind of painting the picture in a different way that I never thought I would. And for me, I guess it’s trying to find some acceptance of the whole process and rewriting your picture of how things are gonna look like in terms of having kids and still holding onto the hope that.
[00:15:49] What’s my plan for me? What’s God’s plan for me? And not losing that hope of wanting children in whatever picture it’s gonna be now. And again, the bridges that you’re crossing and the decisions that you’re making that you never thought you would have to make in these situations that we’re in too. It’s a lot.
[00:16:14] Marian Santos: Yeah, it definitely is. It Sometimes people don’t understand how, you know, and you’re at this point of your treatment, but yet you still struggle mentally, emotionally. It’s because you know yourself, your body is going through all these changes that you have no control what to do without about. And like you said, the portion too, we.
[00:16:44] We’ve always planned to have, you know, two kids at least, and both my wife and I wanted to carry and still do, and going through the IVF plan. It’s like, I wanna go through the process the same time as her, but everything has to be paused on my end because of this, because of cancer. And it just. Puts a toll on you in every aspects of your life.
[00:17:10] And when people ask, how are you doing? You know? And in Philippine culture, a lot of people ask, oh, why don’t you have kids yet at this age? You know, you just wanna tell them, leave me alone. And it’s hard. It’s really hard. But yeah.
[00:17:29] Shawna Bramel: It’s hard and I think when people ask that too, when are you having your second kid?
[00:17:34] It’s everything just comes and slaps you in the face again of you feel like a failure to your husband and your my daughter who wants another sibling. It’s you. You feel like a failure and not to your fault, or it’s just the journey that we’re on. It’s hard to explain it to somebody who’s never been through it.
[00:18:01] And even my husband who was there every day of the treatment, he still doesn’t get it and he never will until he is in our shoes. And what’s nice is to have the support of groups and agencies and support groups where other people get it and they understand it, and they can say, I’ve been in your shoes.
[00:18:23] I know what to do. Do or not do or try this advice or try that advice, and that’s always been helpful for me too. But it is, it’s hard to process through the grief and the failure and or the feelings of failure, I guess I would say. We’re not failures, but it’s just, it’s changing the path that we’re on and it’s opening the doors to other paths, you know, in terms of.
[00:18:54] Fertility options. For us, we’re looking into adoption right now, which is something that was always on the table for us since the beginning. It’s just taking it day by day and not feeling like you have to figure out the future yet. It’s, you know, figure out today and keep the doors open for whatever’s to come and.
[00:19:21] For me, my faith and my trust in God has been a huge blessing and a need for me to get through all of this and say, what’s God’s plan for me? What’s God’s plan for our family? And just trusting what’s meant to be for us and letting go of that control. Because I’m like to be in control of like, what’s going on next?
[00:19:44] What’s, what are we doing next? And it takes a lot to let go of that control and just accept. I am now and God’s plan for me and looking into other options and kind of rewriting that future story that I never thought I’d have to do.
[00:20:03] Marian Santos: Yeah, and part of it too is like having to explain yourself over and over again for the same situation that you went through.
[00:20:12] It’s like sometimes you just wanna tell. Just wanna say I went through it. So when, whenever I, you know, whenever I talk to a friend that I haven’t seen in a long time, and I tell them, oh yeah, I went through this. And I say, with a smile. They call, they look at me crazy like, you know, I went through it, you know I don’t wanna grieve about it anymore.
[00:20:37] So it’s a hard. It’s a really hard, even just talking about it, it still gets me emotional.
[00:20:49] Shawna Bramel: Yeah. And I always word it the same way too of like, I went through breast cancer, you know, I went through it. But it, again, like we said before, it’s something that lives with us forever in so many different facets and aspects of our lives.
[00:21:10] Gave me a different outlook on life though, and made me have such a, like a new zest on life and counting my blessings and having so much gratitude and it gives me a perspective on life that I would’ve never had before. And that’s a huge like takeaway or I guess so. Way that it’s changed me that way and it’s been so humbling for me to be on the patient side of things versus like the social work side of things.
[00:21:51] And it’s such a humbling experience to just go through everything that we did and say, I need help or get help or. Kind of relinquish all of that control or know that a higher being is in control if you believe in God. And it just, it makes you cherish every moment, every day and realize that you have to be kind to people because you never know what situation they’re going through.
[00:22:20] Just like people don’t know what we’re going through. So it changes the way I guess, that you interact with people and treat people and the way that you. Have just a different level of gratitude for life that I may not have had that same before this.
[00:22:38] Marian Santos: It’s definitely made me appreciate all the little things, even more like, you know, not having to go to a doctor’s appointment.
[00:22:49] Oh, or you know, every little thing you may, it makes me appreciate all the friends, all the family that I have that’s surrounding me. It’s definitely one of those things that you do not wish even on your worst enemy that. To go through what we went through. I’m sure you know as much as I know all the radiation appointment that you have to go through, you’re there with someone outside, but really you’re just there by yourself in that big machine and.
[00:23:28] You have 20 minutes of just thinking, why, what am I doing here?
[00:23:35] Shawna Bramel: Exactly.
[00:23:37] Marian Santos: That’s another part of the process is we have a lot of process where it’s dead silence and it’s just. You head going through it. So it gives us a lot of chance to think, appreciate hate everything that can be done in our situation, but it’s definitely given me a positive outlook in life, even though that was such a negative thing to go through.
[00:24:12] I’m the same way as you. My relationship with God is my relationship with God. I definitely call to him and always ask my first question when I got diagnosed is, why me? What did I do wrong? Why me? But I always say, God will not give you a trial you cannot overcome. So maybe he’s just tapping me saying, Hey, you’re strong.
[00:24:39] Adam Walker: But yeah. I’ve got a, I’ve got a question, so I’ll chime in with that. First I want to thank you both for I mean I guess just for talking so honestly about something that I know is so difficult and allowing us to see that I really, I genuinely appreciate it and want you to know that.
[00:25:05] So I guess my question to you is. What would you wanna say to the person listening right now who is mourning the life that a cancer diagnosis took away?
[00:25:25] Shawna Bramel: I would say just take it one step at a time. That was my motto through this whole thing was one step. One more step to victory is what I would say. One more step to victory every day. I was like one step at a time. You don’t have to figure everything out. You have to just pat yourself on the back for the small wins.
[00:25:49] Get in support groups. Reach out to agencies that help and know what you’ve been through so you can get that support. Do therapy if you have to. I’m a big.
[00:26:03] Supporter of doing therapy for your mental health because it’s a lot to go through. I did it. It was very helpful. But you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t know until you’re gonna eventually know it and figure it out. And you gotta give yourself the grace and the permission to just sit where you’re at rest.
[00:26:26] Try to find the answers. Yourself, time to rest too, and just take it one step at a time. It’ll all unfold. You’ll find the answers. And unfortunately you can’t just do it all in one day like we wish we could. And it just it’ll unfold. And lean on this, lean on your supports, whatever that looks like for you too.
[00:26:49] Marian Santos: For me, it’s knowing the type of support system that you know for yourself. I said earlier, I did not want my family to know until I know what was the process to go through this, and knowing that support system, it kind of makes you have a plan for yourself and also have that. Plan for your family because like it or not, they’re gonna be there and they’re going to wanna help you even though you don’t want the help.
[00:27:22] So, you know, yeah. You need to learn. And also, like, like she said, take one day at a time. And for me it was letting yourself know that you’re going to get through this. No matter what your belief is, it’s just a trial, it’s a lesson. Pass through it until it becomes a blessing, you know? One step at a time.
[00:27:48] Yeah.
[00:27:50] Shawna Bramel: And I always say two. One last quick thing too is just advocate for yourself. Speak up, ask questions. A lot of times they can tailor the treatment plan to. Your future goals are for us. We wanna still have children, and so I advocated for extra support for that, whether it’s medications or the pill or things like that too.
[00:28:13] So just always ask those questions that are important to you and your future goals and make sure your doctor knows. because sometimes they don’t ask or sometimes they don’t know. So just speak up and say, I have a question. Is this possible?
[00:28:28] Marian Santos: Never be afraid to speak up. No one. Your significant other, your support system is not going to know what’s in your head.
[00:28:40] So speaking up is the only way to get answers.
[00:28:42] Adam Walker: That’s right. Advocate. Advocate. Advocate all the time. Advocate. Well this has been really amazing. Again I really appreci. Your conversation and just the opportunity to listen and for you to share it with so many people that it will be helpful too.
[00:28:59] So with that, ladies, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
[00:29:04] Marian Santos: Thanks, Adam. Thank you.
[00:29:12] Adam Walker: Thanks for listening to Real Pink, a weekly podcast by Susan G Komen. For more episodes, visit real pink.Komen.org. And for more on breast cancer, visit Komen.org. Make sure to check out at Susan G Komen on social media. I’m your host, Adam. You can find me on Twitter at AJ Walker or on my blog adam j walker.com.