Transcript

Surviving Cancer with Humor | Lisa Giessert | TEDxVeroBeach

so i have a question how many surgeries do you think it takes to determine that you have cancer one might think none that would probably be about right one one might think one for a lot of people that's the case for me it was three which seems like a lot sort of is in my case my cancer was found by accident when a surgeon a general surgeon was doing gallbladder surgery which some of us may have had and it was discovered that i had ovarian cancer oh i heard it oh that's the noise i get whenever i tell somebody when they say oh you're a cancer survivor what type of cancer did you have did you have breast cancer no i didn't have breast cancer not that there's anything wrong with having breast cancer however i did not and everybody says oh you know why they say oh because breast cancer because excuse me ovarian cancer is the silent killer and it does kill most people who get it and the reason it does is because it's very hard to diagnose and most of the time by the time it's been diagnosed it's pretty far spread so in my case as i said it was found by accident i'll give you a quick rundown on my history and that was i was planning my daughter's wedding i was working an executive for a company i was busy traveling around the world had to have gallbladder surgery kind of put it off a little bit finally decided to do it right after my daughter's wedding and general surgeon said i didn't like what i saw down there i didn't know down there was any different than your gallbladder i thought i knew where my parts were however down there for those women that are in the audience is your pelvic region we'll get into that in a minute i know i'm offending some men but this may get a little technical for you so anyways moving on when we get past my daughter's wedding i have some surgeries i go through the fun of being diagnosed with cancer if anybody in the audience has ever been diagnosed with cancer it's a bit like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat you feel like your whole world some people say it's like the rug being pulled out from under you i like the baseball bat in the head because that's really what it feels like in my case i was diagnosed in 2014 had a surgery to remove quite a bit of my innards let's just say and followed by chemotherapy then i was as i call it fat diamond happy moving on with my life thinking life was grand two years later had a reoccurrence so in 2016. but since then we'll get into that in a moment i am uh what we call ned which is no evidence of disease which is a good thing thank you very much if i could dance in front of people without embarrassing my family who's here today i would because there's a shirt i have at home that says dancing with ned ned which is yeah that's a little bit of a humor thing so anyway back up to when i was in the hospital the first time with my first surgery and if anybody's been in the hospital they know what this little assessment tool you know the nurses come in they say where's your pain level well i'm a mom my children are adults but i'm still a mom if there's any moms in the room or watching you think well i'm going to be brave i'm in the worst pain of my life worse than childbirth i feel like you know what but my son who's an adult says standing there looking at me the nurse comes in and says mrs geyser where's your pain level i say it's about a six my son looks me straight in the eye and says mom you say it's a 6 but your face is a 10. and he was right and so the humor piece it's sort of in our family we've used humor to break tension and that's where when i was asked to speak i decided to try to talk about how i learned to laugh at the fact that i have cancer because it really isn't that funny but we try to laugh at ourselves sometimes and in our family it's kind of what we do i put some initials up there it's called tfs um ted talk has some rules so i'm not allowed to cuss so let's just say that means this effing sucks because that was my philosophy when there's also in your room there's a little white board that you could write up there what you want to tell the nurse and that was what my son wrote up there for me and you may have heard that i'm related to somebody associated with this talk but anyway let's move on there's a lot of data here i tried to make it bigger but i couldn't so the takeaway from this is the way they the way the experts look at gynecological cancers and most of them are referred to as ovarian cancer even if they don't start in the ovaries and that what mine did is by relative survival rate for five years five year relative survival rate doesn't seem like a great thing especially when you're the one with it but there's percentages it's based on staging people say oh what stage was your cancer where was it all that kind of stuff you know you don't want to know because it's really not great my case it was stage four which means that it's progressed but it wasn't what they call distant which is means it's metastasized because they talk about it as to where it's located within your body because you're ovarian cancer is kind of an interesting type of cancer let's just say so the survival rates don't look great if you can read those numbers and if you get a reoccurrence the survival rate numbers even are worse so that's why everybody that knows about it goes so it is kind of depressing to even talk about but here's my weed picture no not that kind of weed weeds in your garden because my gynecological oncologist yes that's a mouthful but there is a such a term and there are specialists and if you want to become a doctor that's really a great doctor to become or a nurse because they need lots of them we do have one in the audience i won't point her out but anyway the bottom line is is that gynecological oncologist my doctor explained to me that your ovarian cancer is like weeds in your garden because i didn't quite understand why we had to do all this the surgery is to remove the weeds right you pull them you remove them chemotherapy and radiation is like weed spray spray it down but what happens sometimes the weeds come back that's because there's little seeds that are left within your body and they grow back again so that's that's the way i look at it and that's the way it is um we're gonna talk about chemotherapy for a minute because when you start chemotherapy if you're on if you're a cancer person they give you a little document they tell you what your side effects are going to be of chemotherapy and the first one that's the worst thing that you can have happen they say is losing your hair and i always thought that was a little odd given the fact that i'm married to a bald man and the fact that i thought well losing my hair can't be all that bad and this is the list of more there's another page but this is another list of things that happen when you're on chemotherapy and trust me all of these are way worse than losing your hair and this next group these are ones that in some cases they don't go away when the chemotherapy stops so you still have them like my family might say my mood changes are still there but that's to me just we'll see about that but anyway so this is i did start thinking about the hair loss thing because it was a big deal for me and listening to other people because it was a big deal not just for women but for men as well that's a picture of me without my hair where my hair was thin because i never quite lost it all on the top of my head because i have very thick hair however i did lose it everywhere else so my eyebrows and now with masks i can't imagine walking around with no eyebrows and a mask there'd be no facial expression at all so i'm not quite sure how people would deal with it but then i started to think that really probably the worst thing is the fact that people would know because you walk around if you're a woman and you're bald or you're wearing something on your head and you go in the supermarket the one day of the month that you feel like getting out of the house and strangers look at you with that pity and you think oh they know i'm going through chemo or i just did and so that you might not be ready to share your story yet so that to me is maybe why hair loss is such a big deal for some people the sidebar is you do lose it everywhere so for women no more shaving your legs or under your arms and you lose it everywhere so we won't even go there but anyway so moving on to as i started to say about breast cancer and gynecological cancers those are the two biggies when it comes to women with cancers not that there aren't other cancers i was a big breast cancer supporter breast cancer awareness supporter i have a lot of friends who have fought breast cancer and won i have some that have fought lost the thing that i think is great about breast cancer awareness is that it has brought a lot of money and a lot of awareness to a disease that now is very preventable and very treatable not that you can't still succumb to it but it is preventable and treatable so i'm here to hopefully educate a little bit more on gynecological cancers because they're not as much talked about maybe because it's the parts of the body that we don't like to talk about but i don't think men really like to talk about breasts when it came to things other than okay sidebar but now we have football players running around with pink sneakers on in the month of october what i would like to see is i'm running around with teal sneakers on in the month of september but maybe we'll get there so this is a diagram of your anatomy if you're a woman and hopefully you know where all your parts are and if you're a man and you don't know where all your women's parts are there they are and those are the proper terms for them so if you don't know what they're called that's what they're called and if you have children young children i would please encourage you to tell your children to use the right terms for their parts because if they don't then if something happens and they have a problem they're going to say oh mommy my pee pee poo poo is hurting me or whatever and that's not going to be good or god forbid something happens you want them to be able to explain to you what's going on but sidebar these are all the areas that are considered gynecological cancers and yes as women we can get cancer in any one of those places and none of them are very fun i did circle some at the bottom those are ones that cervical cancer most women go annually to get a pap smear yes those that's a way to help determine early amounts for pet for cervical cancer however there's also another way there's a vaccine that you can take called the hpv vaccine for anybody that may have gotten it as a young child or as a young adult that's also another preventative method so there are ways to prevent those cancers from occurring however you are the other cancers fallopian tube and ovarian cancer and uterine cancer not as much easy to diagnose so there is a blood test you can take but not a hundred percent way to diagnose it so how do you know how you can find it these are the symptoms of gynecological cancer one about most of you but for most of us we have those every day i think i got a little indigestion right now so how do you know that it's cancer and not just a normal everyday whatever is going on in your life my husband would tell me he gets ovarian cancer every time he eats beds food but it's not about what you eat it's about consistently having something going on in your body for about two weeks the same thing in the same area for at least two weeks you really need to go have it checked out and the other thing i would say is my medical infomercial here is if you are a woman past your child-bearing age like i was i know i look so young that's what my doctor told me you're so young to have ovarian cancer i'm like i don't feel young but anyway if you're past childbearing age and maybe you've already had your uterus out like i did but you still have your ovaries you still need to go and get checked even if you're not getting a pap smear you still need to go have all right close your ears gentlemen it's called an internal exam yes women have to do it every year all right now what not to say to somebody who's going through chemo treatment or cancer treatments these are some that just irritate the crap out of me i hate journey oh you're on a journey i don't know my journey would be a nice vacation somewhere and if i'm going to have fun it's not i mean you're so lucky you're so this and i know people are doing their best and they're trying to be supportive but i will tell you what to do don't send stinky flowers set because they remind you of a funeral send funny cards just show up you know my best friend said what can i do for you i said just come sit with me once in a while and sometimes i'll sleep and snore while you're there but just be there or have people show up and fold your laundry one of the hardest things too is to be able to ask for help but you need to be able to ask for help when you need it and the thing the reason i put up there the definition of survive and thrive is one of my friends in one of my cancer support groups said she likes the term cancer thriver not cancer survivor so i had talked about what i was going to talk about today and i kept saying surviving cancer with humor because everybody says blah blah blah you just when you see strangers i say well i'm a cancer survivor i'm a cancer survivor but then i started reading what the definition of survivor is and it's really so negative it's just all about death and destruction and you survived a war you survived something horrible for me thrive is about prospering and flourishing so to me that's a positive thing so i look at it that's what i want to look at is being a thriver not a survivor so i thank my friend for giving me that term so i guess i'll change my title slightly from surviving cancer with humor to thriving with positivity because to me having a humorous perspective is having a positive attitude and as i said in my family we laugh we joke we make fun of each other on a regular basis but we do it with love and i also have seen a lot of my friends that have struggled with cancer and other illnesses that have a very negative attitude and as some of our other speakers have talked about negativity can affect you emotionally as well as physically having a positive attitude is really the most important thing in my in my opinion this is my why this is why i continue to do what i do this is my husband my children my grandchildren and my dogs this is why i get up every day on the right side of the ground and i as i say fight the good fight right i love my life i continue to live it every day is ovarian cancer going to kill me someday probably but we'd all have an expiration date we don't know what it is there's buses whatever you know we don't know how long we have on this earth so for me i choose to live my life with happiness and positivity i choose to live it in such a way that i will fight as well as i can i'm on maintenance infusions every three weeks i go i still got my port for those of you that know about ports i go every three weeks i feel like you know what for about two days and then i move on and now that this i'm boosting i can move on with my travel and get back traveling the world i don't have to worry about anything else except enjoying my life thank you very much for your time you