“Cancer has given me the time to spend with the people I have in my life.”
That's what my cousin, Kathleen Petty, said about her recent double-masectomy and her battle with cancer. I've known Kathleen all my life; She's about eight years older than me, and when we were younger we would always have Christmas Supper at their place, and she spent the entire summer with us one year when she was in her later teens. She got her start in show-biz at the Chinook Theatre in Calgary, and she told us that after about a month she couldn't stand the sight or smell of popcorn, having overindulged a bit too much! Kathleen worked for the CBC in Calgary for a few years, then transferred to Ottawa. She's been there for a long time, but was going to transfer back to Calgary when all of this hit the fan. This is the story, as it appeared in The Ottawa Citizen:
OTTAWA - Ace interviewer Kathleen Petty remembers in slow motion the moments when everything changed for her. She was in the shower - as these calamities often play out - taking a pause from the upheaval in her life.
She had sold her house; was staying with two women she’d befriended at a local dog park; and was days away from saying her final farewell to listeners. She would soon leave Ottawa for Calgary after five years as host of two CBC Radio shows, the top-rated Ottawa Morning and The House.
“And I looked down and my right breast looked different, really different, than my left breast. I thought, ‘How long has it been like that? How could I not notice?’ And I had this sinking feeling.”
She got dressed and, on autopilot, drove to her doctor’s office. Told her physician wasn’t free, she begged to see any available doctor.
That doctor examined her breasts, and her abdomen. All felt abnormal to the touch. Multiple tests were ordered. And in the days that followed, Petty was forced to redraw her plans. She only told listeners that she was dealing with a “health issue” and that she would be remaining in Ottawa to deal with it.
She’d said: “I didn’t want it to be a pity party for Petty.”
Then, for the first time in her career, she took a step back and focused on herself.
During her years in Ottawa, Petty clocked 14-hour days that began at 3.30 a.m. Outside of the radio studio, she lived a “hermit-like existence” and only left her “cave” to walk her German shepherd, Greta. She was so busy, so tired, she rarely took time for herself, whether it was cocktails with colleagues or a routine medical exam.
This drive, and her incisive mind, led to many career successes, most as host and interviewer, including as an early face of CBC’s Newsworld. Last year, she’d decided to return to her hometown to host Calgary’s top-rated morning radio show, and care for her elderly and ailing father.
On a recent sunny Tuesday, Petty, 50, answers the door of her friends’ home, where she is still staying. Greta follows her to the door, with her roommates’ dog Nugget close behind.
Petty wears sweat pants and a sweat shirt. Her head is covered in a bandana, where underneath her hair has started to grow back. She wears no makeup.
“It’s not going to fool anybody,” she says.
Just days ago, she had a double mastectomy. She feels pain at the incision sites and is bothered by a buildup of fluid. She is only comfortable when she holds her arms in the air, which is, of course, impractical.
After preparing cappuccino, she sits at the dining room table, cluttered with a few recent purchases from The Shopping Channel, including reading glasses in five different styles. The political junkie confesses that with so much time on her hands, she has added the talk show Ellen and singing shows like The Voice and American Idol to her regular daily doses of CPAC and CBC’s Power and Politics.
At first, Petty says, she wasn’t keen on giving interviews about her situation. “All kinds of women get breast cancer. I don’t want to hold myself out as something exceptional. Sadly, it’s so normal. I don’t want it to be self-indulgent.”
But she now thinks it’s OK to “give voice” to a common experience.
She speaks matter-of-factly about all that has happened since those moments in the shower last August.
The tests revealed Petty had a large mass in her right breast that was 10 centimetres in size. There were also multiple growths on her ovaries, suggestive of ovarian cancer.
Doctors asked her how she could not have noticed these changes. She frankly isn’t sure.
Then 49, she was waiting to have a mammogram when she turned 50. As it turns out, she was diagnosed with lobular breast cancer, which she has been told is more difficult to detect with a mammogram. So she’s not sure it would have been detected even if she’d had one.
As for the swelling in her abdomen, “I thought it was from chips and muffins.”
Chemotherapy was needed to shrink the breast tumour. But first, a total hysterectomy was ordered to determine what was on her ovaries.
It wasn’t cancer. “I was producing fibroids like a factory,” she said.
In early January, after several rounds of chemo, an MRI showed the breast tumour had shrunk by almost half. Several more rounds were scheduled, and surgery was booked to remove both breasts, and several lymph nodes.
Petty says she opted for a double mastectomy because “what am I going to do with one breast?”
Joking, she adds, “And if I was going to have reconstruction, why would you want to match an old breast? Could I have another ugly one over here please?” She is trying to stay hopeful, but admits she may still be in shock.
“Most people comment on how strong I’ve been. I’m not entirely sure that I’ve processed it even now. I try to deal with what I know and not worry about what I don’t know or can’t predict.”
Oncologists have told her they anticipate a positive prognosis.
But Petty is also a realist. “They don’t know and I don’t know, but I will do everything they tell me to do to increase my odds. But I am not banking on anything.”
Five weeks of daily radiation begin April 10th.
With a lot of time to think, she tries to not second-guess her failure to notice changes earlier.
“What is done is done and I have to deal with what it is.”
In her career, Petty has interviewed thousands of people. An interview with a politician has gone well when she gets “unexpected honesty” from them. For normal folk, she loves finding out information her briefing notes hadn’t included.
If she were interviewing herself about her cancer, what would she ask? She pauses before posing the question.
“I would ask, ‘What is the most difficult part of this?’”
And then she answers: “It’s not knowing what the outcome is going to be. I’m trying to manage that swing back and forth between pessimism and optimism, so I try to stay somewhere in the middle. But I find myself not willing to get too optimistic because I know the statistics.”
When will she feel she’s in the clear?
“The timeline is usually five years,” she says.
Her oncologist has told her she can return to work in August. CBC Calgary is holding her job.
So sometime this summer Petty hopes to load Greta into her car and head for Calgary.
This time, it will be harder to leave than if she’d left last August.
Not only has cancer made her more empathetic, and more aware of the hardships of others, it has also enriched her relationships with colleagues, friends and listeners.
Says Petty, “Cancer has given me the time to spend with the people I have in my life.”
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