As Kristine Lycke enters kindergarten, her mother starts treatment for a mysterious illness.
Kristine Lycke is a Daughter, Mother, Survivor, Warrior. She holds an Honors B.S. Degree in Applied Psychology from Farmingdale State College, which she received – along with the 2017 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence- just 3 years after completing treatment for Stage III Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (breast cancer). Cancer has always been a part of Kristine’s life, having lost her mother to the disease when she was only 8 years old. Wanting to give back to the facility that saved her life, Kristine works as a Patient Care Coordinator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. When she is not working, Kristine enjoys spending time with her wife and learning far more about My Little Pony than she ever thought possible from their 6 year old daughter.
This story originally aired on October 11, 2019 in an episode titled “Silence.”
Story Transcript
I’m the youngest of her four children. She was concerned about the fact that I would be starting kindergarten. She was worried about having an empty nest long before empty nest syndrome was even a thing.
I remember as spring turned into summer, tension in the house started growing. There was a lot of whispering, secret conversations, discussions happening behind closed doors. At some point, my parents sat me down and explained that she needed an operation and who would care for me in her absence. My father made it clear that questions were not welcome. I was to listen to my brothers and sister and be on my best behavior while my mother recovered.
She came home in bandages all over her chest. She was frail and devastated. One of the most vivid memories I have is her sitting in the living room in the dark on the couch crying. She was sobbing but when I asked her what was the matter, she would respond with, “I'm just sad that you're going to start school soon.”
Another memory I have is her being devastated over the fact that she couldn't take us school shopping. She was forced to ask my aunt to take her place.
As I started kindergarten, my mother started treatment. That's what they called it then, treatment. But every now and again I'd hear someone refer to it as chemo.
My mother didn't drive so she was forced to have others take her. Her cousin Josephine was my favorite chauffeur. She would spend time playing with me during the hours that my mother spent receiving her treatment. Promises of bagels and Happy Meals kept me on my best behavior.
But other times it was my mother’s sister who would take us, and she would just drop us off at the hospital, leaving me to sit outside in a hallway waiting for my mother for those hours she was in during treatment.
The surgeries and the treatment, they were torture for my mother. The days following treatment, she was so, so sick, but like my mother, she did her very best to keep it to herself. But I knew something was terribly wrong.
The surgeries and treatment, they were devastating for my mother, but what really destroyed her was gossip. She had found out that a nurse, who was working in the local hospital where she was treated, had shared information, private intimate information regarding her treatment with people at a local fire department and where my parents had been once active.
Almost overnight, my parents decided to sell their house and move down to Williamsburg, Virginia. It was a place they loved dearly, and I can only guess now a place where she could really escape the cancer.
Friends and family were told that she was in remission. We moved and started a new life. On June 25th 1983, as the sun set, my sister and I were running around the house playing tag when my father and my brother pulled up. We ran to them and my father, not being able to connect eye to eye kind of blurted out, “Your mother passed away this afternoon.”
Not really understanding, I looked and I asked him, “When is Mommy coming home?”
He couldn't look back, he couldn't respond so it was my brother Kevin who looked at me and said, “Mommy is never coming home. She died.”
Kevin took us in his room to talk, to console us as he often did, and my father made phone calls and arrangements. We were to move back to New York immediately.
I had never heard of a wake, let alone ever been to one. I remember holding her cold hand, and every now and again I would ask my father to lift me so I could kiss her gently on the cheek. I held it together pretty well for a kid until the morning of her funeral when the funeral director closed the coffin. It was in that moment I realized the finality that I would never see my mother again, that I would never hold her hand or kiss her cheek.
The years after my mother died, my siblings and I tried to piece together the mystery that surrounded her illness, and as a teenager I found her death certificate. I can't say that I was shocked when I found out it was breast cancer.
I was angry that they hadn't shared the truth with us but another part of me understood. See, this was 1983. Breast cancer wasn't about pink ribbons. It was about stigma and shame. And I understood why my mother might have wanted to keep it close, going back to that gossip and that shame and that devastation that she felt when people were talking about intimate details of her body.
If anything good was to come of that, it was that I was vigilant in my screenings. Since age 25, I had endured mammograms that turned into ultrasounds that turned into biopsies that ultimately turned into nothing. So in August 2013 when I was nursing my then ten-month-old daughter and found a lump, I wasn't particularly alarmed.
My OB-GYN didn't hesitate, given my mother's history, and he ordered the mammogram. And again I thought this is just something that's going to turn into a sonogram that's going to turn into a biopsy that's going to turn into nothing, except it was something.
I called my wife and explained to her that they think it's cancer. She hurried to the breast imaging center, she made arrangements for my sister to take care of the baby.
As I consented to the biopsy, the nurse asked me, “How old was she when she was diagnosed?” I quickly did the math in my head. She was 38. I was 38.
I slowly choked back the tears but came apart when I realized that I was going to die. She had died and I was going to do to my child just as she had done to me, except what's worse, my daughter won't even remember me.
I remember waking up after surgery and my surgeon, angel-on-earth Alexandra Heerdt was sitting at the bedside. She wasn't who I expected to see so I knew it was bad news. And she explained that the cancer had spread from the breast to the lymph nodes. She reassured me that the prognosis was still the same. It was excellent. But that the treatment would change.
I had already lost both breasts. Now, I had to lose my hair. I endured eight rounds of dose-dense chemotherapy and 33 rounds of radiation, multiple surgeries and, just to keep life interesting, an infection that landed me in the hospital for five days, which was probably the worst for me and my wife.
I just want to mention that prior to surgery, I had found myself crying every day. The month between diagnosis and actual surgery is a living hell. You have this ticking time bomb in your chest and you just want it out. But I was a stay-at-home mom at the time with this young baby who I thought was going to be a head case because her mother kept crying.
I reached out to one of the social workers at Sloan-Kettering and I explained to her, Roz Kleban that I was afraid that I was causing great detrimental harm to my daughter. She assured me that Maddie would be just fine, that crying was okay, and that whether or not I cried, Maddie would know something was wrong with mama anyway.
Roz asked me, “Christine, what are you so afraid of?”
And I said, “That I'm going to die.”
She said, “Did anyone here say that you were going to die?”
Defensively, I shouted back, “No.”
And she said, “Then stop living as if you are.”
That phone call with Roz changed everything as she reminded me it was my experience, my story. I was not her and Maddie was not me. I became the author of my own life.
None of it was easy but I was blessed, blessed with a devoted wife, an amazing daughter, an extended family who cared for us. And part of that extended family was everyone we encountered here at MSK.
Part of what makes this difficult is that I carry the BRCA gene mutation and so we don't know yet if my daughter carries the same mutation that killed my mother and caused my cancer. So we have devised a plan with the social workers here at Sloan-Kettering to discuss with Maddie openly and honestly with age-appropriate dialogue how to cope with me having been diagnosed, lived through, and surviving cancer.
Maddie is a pretty bright six-year-old and she asked some challenging questions. Lately, she's been asking, “Well, how did you get cancer in the first place?”
I explained that I have a naughty gene that doesn't work the way that it normally does in most people, and it doesn't fight breast cancer effectively.
More recently, she asked me, “Do I have that naughty gene?”
And I responded, like a punch to the gut, “Maybe.” But I assured her that her mother and I, along with everyone here at MSK, will do our best, everything in our power to make sure that she stays healthy.
I'm not sure how my mother would feel about me standing here on this stage sharing her story. I hope she's proud of me, but what I know for sure is that she'd want her granddaughter to live a long and healthy life. I'm counting on this institution, this place that collectively saved my life to fix this naughty gene, to prevent cancer, to find a cure. We can't do that alone. We can't do that by hiding. Only by doing it together, openly and honestly.