Episode 01. Shock & Denial: 7 Stages of Grief

Something to note. We are not healthcare providers or professionals. We are, however, two people who have lived through a monumental medical event and find comfort in sharing what worked for us two others. These are our experiences and are no way meant to treat or diagnose the general public. Always listen to your body and always listen to your doctors for guidance. Alright, let's get into it. I'm Caitlin Rouse and I'm Kevin Adams. We are Going Through it. Hello podcast listeners, I'm Caitlin Rouse and he's Kevin Adams. Welcome to Going Through it. This is a podcast dedicated to unpacking how we are both navigating a very chaotic year together. We are talking about cancer diagnosis, wild pregnant cancer treatments, surgeries and new parenthood. Welcome back. Thank you so much for sticking around for our very first official episode. Recording our intro was very therapeutic and somewhat cathartic for us. I hope that you got as much out of it as we put into it. This week and for the upcoming several weeks, we are going to be focusing on unpacking the seven stages of grief. What fun, no, but in all seriousness, this experience was monumentally traumatizing. There's a lot to grieve my health, my future, my life and its entirety All of that was torn away from me. There were a lot of moments where I felt like I was shipwrecked at sea. I was treading water with absolutely nothing to hold on to. On the particularly harder days, the water would swell or would be extraordinarily choppy and it would close up all around me. I'd try to come up for a breath, but I would choke on the waves every time. It was rough. When I talked to friends or family saying it was hard, it doesn't really seem to adequately cover it, not by a long shot. So as we dissect these stages of grief, we'll be honing in on what each one was like for me, because no two people's experiences are the same. That's a great segue to my next point. This is my experience. Throughout this podcast. I'm going to be deep, diving into what my personal, emotional and mental experience was with fighting through cancer. This does not mean that it's yours, your brothers, your mothers or your neighbors. Cancer is vicious. It is earth-shattering, no matter your age, your race, your gender identity, orientation, religious background, etc. Etc. And it affects everyone and everyone's family differently. Keeping this in mind, please be kind and give a lot of grace to yourself or to whoever you know that has been affected by this. Alright, unofficial PSA over. Let's really dive into this. Betterhelpcom states that quote knowing what to expect during each stage of grief can help you understand the emotional changes that occur following any loss. There are, in fact, seven stages. Some outlets and platforms say five, but reading through all seven I saw listed, I found I identified with those seven stages. So, for a sake of argument, that's the list I'm going to be referring to during this episode and over the course of all upcoming episodes. Those seven stages are as follows One shock and denial. Two pain and guilt. Three anger and bargaining. Four depression. Five upward turn. Six reconstruction and recovery. Seven acceptance. If I'm really being honest here, I wish I would have gone through this list while I was in the thick of it to really validate myself that the emotions I was experiencing was part of the natural grieving process. I didn't, but you know that's fine, because now I'm here I'm able to break it down after the fact, which is really optimal, because even living to an after the fact I'm really grateful for, and that's the best gift of all. Today we're unpacking stage one, shock and denial. And what a true shock it was. I want you, as a listener, to picture this. You're a 32 year old lady. Finally, for the first time in your life you're financially secure. You've worked really hard to get here and you've had the privilege of doing some traveling and had some experiences that you wouldn't trade for the world. But you're still relatively young and there's still more that you want to see and more that you want to do. Then you find out you're pregnant. Your head spins because you never saw this, not even when you were small. As a side note, I legit dreaded my plastic Barbie dream house to my younger sister because I wanted to clear out a cabinet so my Barbie could live in an apartment. I was nine. I was really focused on my own growth, personally and professionally at this point in my life. Speaking of, I had worked hard after years of doing makeup professionally for retail, then stage, then fashion, then film, then celebrity, to switch to the corporate side of beauty. I really enjoyed the feeling of making an impact on a team. But anyway I digress At this point I've decided that I'm going to choose to have this child. I'm six months into a pregnancy I never thought would happen and only to have been struggling with a lot of pain in my left breast. It felt like a knot, almost like when you have a muscle knot in your back. I spoke to my OB several times about this. The first two times she told me quote everything swells when you're pregnant. Try a heat pad on your breast for relief. End quote. I tried. Nothing helped. It actually got worse and as the weeks came and went, the knot became larger and the pain became constant. I mentioned it again, I was again told everything swells. And then this is not a joke, I'm totally serious. This is what she told me. Quote cancer doesn't hurt, so there's no need to get stressed about that. End quote. It's at this point that I basically begged her to help and she wrote me a referral to get a breast ultrasound done. A week later I went for the ultrasound. When the tech completed the ultrasound, they told me okay, the doctor is going to review the results and then I'll come back in to talk with you. Okay, sounds good. I said, and I remember sitting in this really small room staring at a clock on the wall. It was ticking really loud and I left my phone in a closet outside the room because they asked you, when you stripped down, to leave your belongings outside. I watched and listened to the ticking for five minutes, but then the five minutes turned to 10 and then to 15. I was starting to get kind of nervous. I didn't think anything was super serious, remember. I was very eloquently assured by my doctor, but as the time ticked away I started to become a little paranoid. Had something truly gone wrong? Did I not take enough vitamins while carrying my son? Maybe the odd glass of wine every now and again truly was damaging. Maybe not even to my son, but to me. Maybe it was just their machine or their computer. Maybe there was some error, or the tech hadn't had our lunch yet and she had taken the opportunity to slip a few bites in of a sandwich. While I waited, as I'm thinking this, the door opened and a woman I hadn't met before came in, followed by the tech. This is the doctor. The tech introduced me Nice to meet you. I said we're seeing something that's a cause for concern on your ultrasound. The mass itself does not consist of matter of fact points. When a mass is well constructed, that's typically something we see in a benign mass. This is not. Your mass is larger than we typically see and the edges are not well defined. We're also seeing evidence of a lymph node under your arm that's enlarged. This can sometimes be an indicator that something is a miss. I strongly recommend you get a biopsy today. Oh, today, like here at this facility. I said yes. She responded oh, okay, what time? What time? My thoughts are racing. I'm thinking I stepped away from work to accommodate this appointment. I was supposed to be back online within the hour. Well, we could do it in about an hour. The doctor said oh, okay, listeners, I was terrified. I've never had any type of surgery or invasive procedure. I barely ever even had anything more than a blood test and a pap smear. I've never been medicated, except for a small prescription of Xanax for anxiety. I've always taken a multivitamin, and that's it. What did this all mean? What was going on? I went down to the car where Kevin's waiting for me and I tell him this Okay, you want to get some food? Before I called my boss and I let her know I was going to be longer and why. I tried not to cry on the phone with her and as I stifled a particularly rogue sob, she said listen, caitlin, this is your health. This is non-negotiable, no matter what happens today and beyond. We will figure this out One step at a time, and we will figure this out. She is no longer my boss, but that was by far the best thing I could have ever heard at the time. So matter of fact, and so kind and supportive. We drove back to the facility. I did the biopsy. Turns out they could only use some local low-grade anesthesia because I was pregnant. I was told to lay on the table, remove my clothes from the waist up, and I stared at the ceiling and cried for the entirety of the procedure. I remember on the ceiling there was one ceiling tile that was painted to look like a beach, and I remember staring at the palm tree and this painted sunset and just wishing, hoping that that's where I was. The women in that room with me were so kind and so comforting. I remember feeling so ashamed and embarrassed, but I was so fucking scared. What did this mean for me? What did this mean for my son? What if this was bad? I don't think I slept that night. A week later, on June 20th 2022, my OB called and she confirmed the worst. She told me that I had breast cancer. Do you know, when you watch movies and the character suddenly realizes some major plot twist, and in that moment the frame and the audio slows down and everything becomes low and stretches out. Visuals stretch out, almost tunneling On one point. That's what it felt like as I sat in my kitchen. That was the shock. My OB hung up on me while I was in the middle of asking her a question. After delivering this news, she eventually called me back and apologized. Now I can't imagine what it's like to have to deliver news like that to someone, and perhaps she felt a lot of guilt, given she made no effort to listen to me or my concerns in the beginning stages of this. But man, was she the absolute worst in this process? I can't remember if I slept that night, but after a few hours of that initial shock I very quickly moved on to denial. There was no way this could happen to me. Maybe someone accidentally put my papers in the wrong stack in the office? Maybe because of that paper mix-up, communication had gone on so long from the facility's team to my doctor's team and the truth just got lost in the shuffle. No, this couldn't be right. I've lived 32 years of being completely healthy. There is absolutely no history of cancer on either side of my family, my mothers or my fathers. There had to be some sort of awful mistake. I held on to that hope and I held on to that hope for a long time, well into my first treatments for cancer. It's a funny thing hope, particularly false hope and depending on how much you feed it, there's the opportunity for it to become dangerous, but that's anything you feed too much. I would then go on to have lots of appointments and meet a lot of new doctors. Things were expedited very quickly because I was pregnant and every time I was asked who in my family had cancer if it was my mother's side, if it was my father's side I had to watch the look of exasperation or surprise cross so many people's faces. It started to feel like there was no way that this could be real. So I moved back to Baltimore Within how long was it? I don't think it was even a month, but I had to go by myself. Kevin stayed back and packed up our entire condo and moved by himself up here. I slept every night in the guest room at my dad's house, the house I grew up in. Every week my belly got a little bit bigger and although I was around family, I never felt so alone. I wanted Kevin beside me more than anything. How can I be pregnant with our child by myself? I had surgery done, which was the port insulation which, by the way, is just as awful as it sounds. It's a metal port that is installed into your chest with some tubing, and that port is used to be plugged into machines to receive your cancer treatment. I remember now Kevin made it just in time for that they literally did that surgery and then wheeled me up to get my very first chemo treatment. I was told that I was going to have some sort of twilight anesthesia for that surgery and as I was being wheeled into the OR, they told me oh actually, no, we're not going to give you any type of anesthesia, we're just going to give you Benadryl. I remember laying on that table and they had my lower half all tented up where they were performing the procedure. I could only look through this very small crack in the tenting on the side. I remember this nurse. She would bend down and look through that tiny crack every now and again, ask me if I was okay. At one point I was crying so much that my tears were going up into my hair line across my forehead. I just remember locking eyes with her and saying this sucks. As we go through these stages of grief, and particularly this one, the shock and the denial of it all. Something's not lost on me, no matter what you're grieving, no matter what you've lost, that shock is not an easy thing to digest. The denial is placed there as almost a life raft, something to help you cope. I think I really needed help coping because, as foreign as all of this was to me, again I feel like a broken record here, but the feeling of isolation is indescribable. Now, something that does make my case particularly different and particularly compelling is that I was pregnant and speaking about support and coping that little boy in my belly. Through all of this, through those initial moments and long stages of shock and denial, when I felt like the world was closing in on me and I didn't know how I was going to do it. I would feel his thumping in my belly and now, in retrospect, I really find that he was reassuring me, that he was okay, that I could focus on myself and trying to get myself better. I know that nobody truly does anything alone, but to have somebody, somebody growing inside of you to remind you every day that they're still there, it was truly a bond that I don't think I can quite verbalize. Thinking about all of this and hearing myself even talk about this now, it's like, oh my god, there's six more, there's more from here. But there is right, this was a heavy journey. It's not easy. I think we're going to talk about this a lot later, but there will be an onslaught of opinions and advice that people will try to give you and I think it does come from someplace. Good right, sometimes when people try to empathize with one another, they just relate back to the only experience that they see as similar. But it's not. Unless you were pregnant and diagnosed with breast cancer, your experience is not the same and, to be quite frank, you have no right to tell me how I should be handling the situation. So, with that said, the denial stage was a hopeful stage for me. It gave me strength, which is funny to say that now aloud but it allowed me to hope that there was some mixup, that it was wrong, that going through everything that I did was somebody's fault that I could point to and say that's why it was wrong, instead of because I was born like this. I don't think anybody would ever have a positive reaction to learn that they've been diagnosed with cancer. But I think being young and pregnant made it particularly hard and, you know, I think it's important for me to remember now in retrospect that there are other people that have done this, that it's not just me, and having that comfort really, really helped me. I actually was connected by my nurse navigator to a woman who was also diagnosed with breast cancer while she was pregnant. That was the most validating and normalizing thing. I think that could have happened to me Because, again, I was so terrified and all of this was so foreign. It helped leaps and bounds. So, in summation, when you want to talk about shock and denial, reading through all seven stages of grief, I think this was the one that I identified with the most because it was the most prevalent. It was the one that really hit very close to home because the shock of it there was no home. Right In this process. Now I've talked to a lot of women who have either gone through this or fear going through this because breast cancer runs in their family, and that was just never my reality. I never thought that one day I would be sitting across from the doctor and they'd be like you have breast cancer. It just wasn't ever anything that existed in my reality. I never even heard the words breast cancer in a doctor's office or within my own family, so it became very, very strange. I can share that. Later on I would go to find out. My oncologist surgeon shared with me that after all of the genetic testing that they did, after all the surgeries that they performed, that I had a 0.8% chance of developing breast cancer in my lifetime 0.8%. You want to talk about paranoia with any type of statistics now, anytime someone's like, oh well, you only have a 15% chance of that happening in my brain, I'm going oh, that's definitely going to happen. Now, it's insane, it's very, very weird and I think hearing that 100% helped validate that denial, if that makes sense. It validated the fact that I wasn't denial for so long, holding on to that hope that there had been some crazy mix up because the chance was so small. All of that to say. If you identify as a woman and you're even in your 30s, I really recommend just checking things out when you're taking a bath, when you're in the shower. Please Google how to give yourself an at home breast exam. It's pretty straightforward and easy. You just kind of feel yourself up for a second. That's me making light of the situation, but it's truly. I mean, it's easy and it's important, because I don't know if it's a federal law but doctors don't have to ask for mammograms until you're 40. And this is very unfortunate. I think it's a problem. There's a lot of women that I've met under 40 that have been diagnosed with breast cancer, and how would they have known? Because we're not supposed to be doing the testing. Please pay attention to your own body. You know your body better than anybody else and you know when something's wrong. If something feels off, speak up and say something. If your doctor makes light of it or brushes you off, please advocate for yourself. It is so important to ensuring your health and ensuring your survival. So, with that said, I really want to reiterate again if there are any listeners who are facing anything remotely similar to what I have been through, please know that you are strong, You're graceful, you're so beautiful Even when you don't feel like it. Even when you look in the mirror you feel like a monster or you don't recognize the person staring back at you. You are so capable of fighting through this and so much more from here. If I can do this. You can absolutely do this.