I Met the Love of My Life, and Then I Was Diagnosed With Breast Cancer

Photos courtesy of Stephanie Sperber

On September 11, 2007, I woke up thinking about how lucky I was. I was 42 and had just come out on the other side of a tough divorce. I had a beautiful 5-year-old daughter and we lived in a lovely old house. I felt incredibly liberated and excited about making a new life together after a difficult and jarring period of turmoil with her father.

It was my little girl’s first week in kindergarten, and things were off to a great start at her new school. I had built an exciting and rewarding career that was going full-steam ahead as a high-level executive at Universal Pictures. I oversaw a team of 75 people, traveled all over the world meeting interesting and diverse business leaders, and was achieving huge success at the studio.

But on that particular morning, I was really thinking about how lucky I was to have found my new boyfriend, Andy. As I drove to the studio, I thought how funny it was to call him my boyfriend, as we were both in our forties. “Boyfriend” felt like a word to be used in high school, not a word that a divorced, single mom with a big career would use. But Andy made me feel like I was in high school again. My heart skipped a beat every time I saw him or heard his voice. I knew, deep down, that he was the love of my life.

On that sunny fall morning, I was on top of the world. I got to work early, ready to start a busy day. Then the phone rang.

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It was my doctor, who a week earlier, had done a very simple biopsy on what she felt was a small, benign cyst. Turned out to be anything but: she told me I had cancer and that it was aggressive, having already spread to my lymph node.

She informed me that I would have to undergo six months of rigorous chemotherapy immediately, double mastectomies, and weeks of radiation, and that because I turned out to be BRCA positive, it was critical to have my ovaries removed at the end of all the treatment … if I lived through it.

In that split second, my life changed in a profound and permanent way. Would I live to see my daughter start first grade? Would I be able to keep working through the treatment or would I have to quit my job? And how would Andy react to me losing my hair, my breasts?

I’m not sure how I actually remembered how to dial a phone at that moment, but I managed to get him on the phone and somehow broke the news.

In a babble of fear and sobs, I told him that I wouldn’t blame him if he wanted to break up with me immediately. We weren’t married, we were still in the first blush of dating, and it was going to get real hard, real fast.

At first he was silent … then I heard him start to laugh. He said he was laughing because breaking up was the last thing on earth he wanted to do. In his words, all the treatment to follow was just a temporary phase that we would get through … together.

A few weeks later, after my first chemo, my beautiful long, blonde hair started to fall out. First just a few strands, then huge chunks.

I became hysterical — not necessarily out of vanity, but out of fear. Fear that I would look like a victim, fear that I wouldn’t be seen by the man I loved as anything but a cancer patient. Fear that he wouldn’t want to be seen in public with me, fear that he wouldn’t see me as sexy.

Again, I called him in tears and he asked me to come to his house immediately. When I got there, he had a glass of my favorite wine poured for me and a chair placed on the patio. On it were a pair of scissors, clippers, and a towel. Andy was going to shave my head clean.

I was trembling as I sat down. I drank my wine in one gulp and told him to get started. He took my long hair in one hand and the scissors in the other and cut off my ponytail. He held it up for me to see, and we both started laughing and crying at the same time. Then the clippers started on my remaining hair.  It all took about 5 minutes.

Andy looked at me and smiled, reached out and rubbed my bald head, and asked me if I wanted to take a look. I crept toward the bathroom mirror hiding behind him, afraid of what I would see. As I peeked out to catch a glimpse, I was shocked. Shocked to have no hair, but more shocked to see that I actually didn’t look too bad.

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I sneaked a look at Andy, who had a devilish gleam in his eye. “Come to bed,” he said, taking my hand and leading me to the bedroom.

He knew, somehow, that I needed to feel like a woman, to feel desirable, to lose myself even if for a few moments, and to realize our connection and intimacy was not based on the length of my hair.

As my treatment went on, I lost my eyebrows, all my eyelashes, and all body hair with the exception of my legs. Yes, you still have to shave your legs during chemo — talk about a cruel joke.

My skin yellowed. I lost 20 pounds. I refused to wear a wig — instead, I wore a white bandana and huge hoop earrings every day. I called it my pirate look.

But even as it robbed me of my hair and my health, cancer was powerless to take away the things in my life that mattered the most. Through it all, Andy and I went to dinners, parties, concerts. We watched movies, took my daughter to the playground, and snuggled. We celebrated New Year’s Eve 2008 by buying the biggest lobsters we could find, making a fire, and having a picnic on the living room floor.

Andy made me feel normal when my entire life was thrown into chaos. He made me feel sexy, desirable, and loved. He kept me grounded and helped me focus on what was truly important: getting past this “speed bump” in the road of our life together.

Even though our love was new, I believe it was strengthened by the test it endured in those early days. Andy was by my side as I took on the toughest battle — the fight for my life — and he held my hand every step of the way. He rose to the occasion, and his courage gave me strength. I spend every day feeling grateful for the love of this man, my partner through thick and thin, my partner for life.

This morning, almost seven years to the day from that early morning phone call, I got up from the bed Andy and I share and walked into our daughter’s room to get her ready for sixth grade. I made coffee, shared the sink as Andy shaved, and we bustled off to school and work.

And on this sunny fall morning, I still find myself thinking how lucky I am. How very truly and deeply lucky.

By Stephanie Sperber, for Babble.com

For the second hardest conversation this mom had to have with her daughter, visit Babble.

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