Shorma James loves life but cancer has threatened to take it away from her not once, but four times.
She is heading off to Miami today for a battery of tests to find out whether she will be lucky the fifth time around but you would never believe the 53-year has been fighting this battle for the last 13 years.
Monday was in fact her 13th anniversary as a cancer survivor and she marked it by being busy, continuing to do the thing that has sustained her throughout – work.
She was an employee of Courts Barbados Limited for 26 years and remarkably turned up for work just days after undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy each time she underwent such treatment.
“You are hairless, hair falls from everywhere,” Shorma told Easy with a chuckle. She said that when she became bald from chemo, she wore a wig. “One day at work my head got so hot, I tossed the ugly wig aside and my scalp was so yellow, but I did not care if my colleagues saw it. I was happy to be at work, happy to be alive, happy in general,” she said.
“It is the grace of God that would have kept me going to work during all those years.”
Shorma had a troublesome left breast as a teenager. “It was an abscess which caused a lot of pain, fever and headache. I had to go to the doctor and have the stuff taken out of the abscess.”
Year later, just after the birth of her daughter, doctors told her one of the milk ducts was broken and needed surgical repair. That procedure was done.
Some years following that surgery, she was not alarmed when she felt a tiny lump in the same breast, especially when her doctor would continuously assure her it was “scar tissue and it would heal.”
Instead, the lump got “bigger and bigger and bigger” until eventually she had a another doctor who decided to do a biopsy.
It was cancer.
Thus began the long battle with the disease which many people regard as a death sentence.
Not Shorma. She said: “I came up with that slogan ‘cancer is not a death sentence’ and where there is life there is hope and especially if you hope in Christ.”
One doctor wanted to take off the breast, another doctor told her the cancer was confined to one area and they would have gotten all of it, so it made no sense to take the breast off, though he did not guarantee that the breast was going to last forever. She chose to submit to four doses of chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments.
However in 2008 the disease would attack for the second time and this time she underwent total removal of the left breast. Complications as a result of the steroids and chemotherapy forced her to be hospitalised twice with an infected pancreas that resulted in diabetes. She was sidelined at home from her Courts Barbados job for an entire year.
“I never felt less than a woman by losing my breast, I never felt different from anybody else. I just continued to live life as normal” Shorma says.
Any hopes she may have had to be finally rid of the dreaded disease were dashed when four years after undergoing the mastectomy; three tiny lumps appeared in the remaining scar. “What really alerted me was that I could see the blueness under my skin.” Those lumps proved to be cancerous. She decided she would take no more chemo and opted instead for oral treatment with the breast cancer drug Tamoxifen.
Shorma’ s home is tastefully appointed, an example of the latent talent she is developing, having just completed an interior decorating course. “I refuse to sit and mope and say ‘cancer here I am.’ Cancer has to come and find me” she says.
It has found her – a fourth time. Last November she felt a lump under her arm pit. She went off to Miami to have her yearly Pet scan, MRI, mammogram and ultrasound done, only to learn from doctors there that the lump was so embedded in tissue and nerves, they could not remove all of it for fear of comprising her ability to use her arm. They also advised the disease had spread to her lymph node.
Fashionably dressed and exuding radiance as she reclined at her home last Monday, Shorma told Easy: “I am here sitting waiting to go up to Miami to figure out what we are going to do because one of the things the doctor said is anytime cancer spreads to the lymph node, it probably will spread to your liver and your bones as well.”
“For me it has been quite a battle, quite a journey, quite a task, but I have never once felt like giving up , never once felt like this is the end of the road. I always go to bed and pray. When I wake up I say ‘maybe today is the day they will find a cure for cancer.’ I live optimistically, always looking at what can happen.”
She worships at the New Dimensions Ministries and said: “Going through cancer four times is not easy but I continue to trust; I continue to believe that when God says he is my healer that he is a healer and I can hope in that.
“Along with that there are some awesome friends that I have had along the way and it has kept me to the point where I can give advice on this positiveness to someone else.”
Even now her focus is not on her own trials, but on how she can become an advocate to assist others journeying with cancer.
“If there is one thing I want to leave with people throughout the whole ordeal of my life is a word of encouragement. If I can encourage one person just by hearing my story or reading my story, that there is always life after cancer, then I want to do that.”
She has lost a few friends to the disease and as a member of the Barbados Cancer Support Services Victorious Women’s group, offers support to others battling the disease. She appreciates what it means to receive the cancer diagnosis and having to face it alone.
“I want to educate people. I want to help people. I have walked that road long enough that I would be able to help people” she said.
“When I was first diagnosed there was not a support system” she added while expressing gratitude for the support given by a “good friend” named Margaret.
She also values the counselling she received and the major role played by the Cancer Support Services throughout her ordeal.
The mother of one daughter is buoyed too by her grandchildren, six-year-old Naaria and Anisa, six months old. “They give me something to look forward to” she said.
Shorma concluded: “Going through cancer four times is not easy but I continue to trust, I continue to believe that when God says he is my healer, that he is a healer and I can hope in that, along with some awesome friends that I have had along the way.”
In a fit of laughter she added: “I think when cancer sees my name, it kind of runs. It might come back but it runs from me every time and I get stronger.” (GC)
