Edith Sarmiento

Edith Sarmiento is a breast cancer survivor.

They detected the cancer in February of 2003. This February I’ll have survived cancer for 5 years.

They detected my breast cancer by coincidence. I took a group of women to have breast cancer exams and they had their exams. In the middle of it all they said it was time that I had an exam. I said no because I’d had an exam just six months before. But they detected my breast cancer just because I’d accompanied some friends to have their exams. That day they detected breast cancer. Since that day things have changed a lot. Our lives have changed completely. My husband and my 4 kids’ lives have totally changed. I thought the world would end. I saw death. I was lost. I had no idea what cancer was, I had only heard of it. I never thought that cancer would happen to me. In my family I’m the first. My mother and my sisters don’t have cancer. At the beginning I thought maybe I’d done something bad in this life, that maybe the Supreme Being was punishing me. I didn’t know anything more than what I’d heard on the news or some statistics about cancer. I had to learn what cancer was. I approached some institutions. I got to know the CancerCare organization. People from that organization helped me. I learned a lot about cancer and now that I’ve survived cancer for 5 years, I’d say that I learned to know cancer, and here I am living and struggling against cancer.

The side effects I’ve had since the chemotherapy have been really hard. After the chemotherapy I vomited a lot, had diarrhea, I couldn’t eat, my mouth hurt a lot, my stomach. I had different things that happened to me. My whole body hurt. Five years have passed since my treatment and now the pain I have is in the joints of my feet, the joints of my hands and they’re there 24 hours a day. The doctors have given me a lot of tests and they tell me there’s nothing wrong and that when I can’t stand the pain I should take a pill. The pain is in my joints. The pain is what has stayed with me and that’s definitively what bothers me, especially when I wake up in the mornings. I have to do exercises for 15 to 20 minutes, moving my feet, my hands, my fingers, my toes. Once I’ve done my 15 minutes of exercise, I can get up and the day goes on and as my body warms up the pain starts to go down. Even so the doctors tell me I don’t have anything and that they can’t find anything. They say, “Edith, the pain is in your head.” The pain is always in the joints of my hands and feet. If I walk it hurts. If I sit it hurts. I take the pill and it alleviates the pain a little, but it’s only about six hours that I don’t feel pain. But now the pain pills bother my stomach a lot. It’s as though I had needles in my joints. It feels like I’m being stabbed. There are times when I get up and I have to sit back down because I can’t stand the pain in my feet. There are times when I’m riding on the train and one stop before my stop I have to start warming up, doing exercises, so that I can stand up. Once I’m standing, I walk a little and then I don’t have any trouble.

Previously, I feel I was a lot more patient with my children. Now, the pain is there, and I get irritated very quickly. I definitely get irritated quickly. Sometimes I shout. It’s a way of letting go because I can’t stand the pain. I have to take the pill but the pill is sometimes bad for me. It hurts my stomach. I’ve always got stomach pain so I prefer to move around and do some exercises. The doctor suggested these exercises, and I do them, but my personality has changed a lot.

A woman from CancerCare told me, “Mrs. Edith, count from 1 to 10 in Chinese.” But that makes me laugh, because I don’t know Chinese. It means control yourself and that’s all. For the love of my kids. There’s a support group on Mondays. The women speak and I’ve learned to contain my temper. The social worker has helped me to control my temper.

What I normally did in a day now takes an hour, hour and a half. I’m fatigued. I tire too easily. Every other minute I’m tired. I relax but the fatigue is always there. You can’t be the same as before no matter how much the doctor has done for me. Lots of tests of my liver because he says that could be one of the causes, but the fatigue isn’t there. Since I had the chemotherapy treatment, the fatigue is there. Since the first chemotherapy session, I felt that. Even now I do things in my house, but it definitely takes me double the time. I get very tired. I stop doing them and that’s how I spend the whole day doing things. I’m always tired and when it’s too cold I go out in the street and I can’t breathe. I get fatigued a lot and I have to look for something warm and even in the summer I go out in the street and I can’t breathe. I lack air but everyone says this is normal. I even say to myself, “Edith, go on, it’s normal, go on.”

During the time that I am up I do my normal things in the house. I always have to do it with twice the time because I get fatigued every day. I mean I’m always tired. The doctors tell me that I don’t have anything but I’m always tired, even at night I’m tired. I drink some tea or something but even so I feel fatigued.

I’ve suffered neuropathy from the treatment. I’ve lost sensation in my fingers and in my toes that are similar to needle punctures. Definitively you can’t walk and with the passage of time it will slowly move on. But it’s always there, especially in my feet. With time, they’ve told me it will go away, but it’s been 5 years of surviving cancer and I have these needles in my feet. I say needles because for me they’re like needles - like a tickling, like a little puncture more than anything, all here in my fingers and the same in my toes. They tell me that with time it will pass, but I'm waiting for it to pass and I think that sometime soon it will go. I do exercises every day in the morning and in the mid-afternoon. They've told me that I should do the exercises making the movements of the letters of the alphabet with my feet or holding a soft ball, putting it on the soles of my feet. But I don’t feel improvement. I spend my life with the piercing, a sensation of ant bites, a sensation of needles. I don’t know how to describe it. But even so I walk. I distract myself. A lot of times I read. I read a lot and try to do other things to not think so much about what’s hurting me.

My image of my body during and since the treatment has changed a lot. In April of 2003 they cut my breast. So from that date until now I have not been able to look at myself in the mirror. I don’t look at myself directly in the mirror of my house, or any other mirror. I’m not brave enough to look at myself. Another thing that affected me a lot was my hair falling out. During the treatment it was falling out.

Even though I knew my hair was going to fall out it was totally traumatic. When I was taking a bath I put some shampoo in my hair and a lot of hair began to fall out. I cried. I screamed in the bath but I said, “No, you’re pretty.” I put scarves on. I put on wigs that I could get through the CancerCare organization, and I tried to make myself as pretty as I could so that my children wouldn’t feel bad. I also remember something else that was not pleasant on the points of my fingers. The nails turned black. That was not pleasant. I was always trying to hide my hands or I would make a fist so nobody would see me. Sometimes when I had a conversation blood would come out of my mouth. These things that happened to me were hard, very hard for my family. I always tried not to cry in front of them. I didn’t want to cry in front of them, but they were always there giving me strength. I thank all the people that helped me keep going.

I don’t have medical insurance. It has been very hard to get medical insurance. In the hospital where they detected my cancer they asked me for medical insurance. I told them I didn’t have any and they told me that I was not a patient for that hospital and that I should go to a city hospital. I said if, in this hospital where they detected my cancer, they don’t help me they’re going to help me even worse in the city hospital. Then I arrived here and, with my heart broken, I realized that a human being was not capable of feeling what I was feeling. But I went to the other hospital and the first thing they told me was not to worry and that they were going to help me. The people from that hospital gave me the name of CancerCare - that I should go there and that they would help me. So I came to CancerCare and they helped me. They gave me a small check. They also helped me with food because I couldn’t eat and we were in bad shape - we were in very bad shape. Everything fell on us. My husband was without work. The news of the cancer, him without work and everything, it seemed that the greatest disgrace had fallen upon my house. So I came to CancerCare and a young social worker would always raise my spirits when I was having difficult days. She would say, “Edith, if all the doors close on you, God will open you a little window.” These words would always lift my spirits. All the doors did close on me at that time, but always a little window would open. I give thanks to God and especially to my social worker at CancerCare who gave me that. She has planted that phrase in my mind. We’ve had a lot of suffering with respect to money but here we are. We’ve gone through a lot and I give thanks to God for the people that have helped us.

During my cancer treatment my husband helped me a lot. He has been with me up through today. He is always telling me “It doesn’t matter, keep going, keep going. I didn’t just get married for the prosperous years; I married you for the good and the bad too.” We’ve been married almost 25 years. We have 4 children. My oldest son always helped me with the household things when I couldn’t do them. The little kids, at that point in time were little, but now they’re older, so if I couldn’t pick something up they’d help me, “mommy, don’t you worry, we’ll help you cook.” But they had to learn to do things around the house. They tried to do everything they could. My sister also helped me a lot. I also felt the need to call my mother in Ecuador, and, no matter what time, she was willing to listen to me. We talked sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning, because I couldn’t sleep and, all the way from Ecuador, she would tell me, “You have people to fight for. You have your children. You have your husband. You can’t give up easily.” She had a phrase that my kids and I repeat, “Cancer is not going to kill me. I’m going to beat the cancer. This woman is going to die of whatever other thing but not of cancer.” Here we are struggling and they are willing. They say, "Don’t worry mommy. Take your time.” They are always helping me. They are always on top of what I’m going to do and how long I’ll be delayed in the hospital and what appointment I have. They ask, “Mommy do you need help? Maybe you need somebody to translate for you?” They were always available for me, especially my husband. But he always says he didn’t marry just for the good times, “I got married for the bad and the good.”

Being connected with a support group teaches us, because if some cancer patient has had a treatment then she comes and asks the moderator of the group, who are educated people, and they tell her what they think of this medication. You learn from the group and from the other people. Sometimes they have taken the drug and they tell those who have recently started coming to the group and it is a way to raise our spirits - it’s a way of learning. I call it learning because I was convinced that cancer could be measured from 1 to 10. But when I came to the group to learn, and to hear the experiences of the other ladies, I realized and I learned that cancer is measured from 1 to 4. But knowing is better and I give thanks to God for the support groups because you learn a lot from the experiences of the ladies that are in front of you and in this way we all learned.

To live with strength is to forget about what has happened to you and focus always on the future. To live strong is to live for the future without worrying about what you’ve suffered, without worrying about what has already happened. You have to live with strength for the morning.

I’m Edith Sarmiento and I’m a survivor of breast cancer.