“Something you never think about is how to tell your ten year old son you have cancer. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life”.
Meet Arianne Lang, a woman brimming with energy and zest for life. Someone identifying with so many different roles: mother, daughter, wife, friend, and TELUS Health team member.
A TELUS team member for over 15 years, she joined TELUS Health in 2018 after her father passed away from a stroke. “Losing my father devastated me”, says Arianne, “I joined TELUS Health because I wanted to be more involved in transforming healthcare. I wanted to make a difference”.
Little did Arianne know that at 42, a new identity she would reckon with would be someone with cancer, and her journey with the disease would invoke in her a passion to educate and raise awareness of the importance of prevention and early detection.
When speaking about her journey through diagnosis and treatment, Arianne maintains a sense of humour, joking that she “becomes Rain Man” because she remembers every day, every phone call, every part of the process – as though it was happening in slow motion.
It all started when a friend informed her that she should get a mammogram because she was over 40, and in BC, you can self-refer to get a mammogram over the age of 40. “I was so busy”, says Arianne “but after almost two years of my girlfriend basically nagging me to do it, when the chaos of COVID cleared up, I finally went in for my first mammogram at the beginning of May 2022.”
In BC, while women over 40 can refer themselves for a mammogram – the results must be sent to a healthcare practitioner. In Arianne’s case, she, like approximately 1 in 5 people in BC, didn’t have a family doctor. So in the absence of a family doctor, she had the results sent to a virtual care provider, TELUS Health MyCare.
“MyCare allows anyone to book an appointment with a family physician, and is available for free to most people in Canada”, she says, “in many ways, knowing that I could have my mammogram results sent there may have saved my life”.
The results of Arianne’s first mammogram were unclear, and her physician referred her for a second mammogram and ultrasound on July 4th. After the follow-up mammogram and ultrasound, they discovered two lumps in her left breast.
Arianne was unaware of these lumps, as they were undetectable through self-exam, and only discovered by screening. She underwent a biopsy to determine the nature of the two lumps on July 15th.
However on July 25th, Arianne’s life was flipped upside down. “It was a Monday and it was a beautiful summer day”, she says, “I didn’t expect to be going to bed that night a totally different person”.
The TELUS Health MyCare physician called Arianne with the results of her biopsy. “The doctor asked me if I was home alone”, she says, “and I knew that the news wasn’t going to be good. My husband joined the video chat with me”.
The doctor informed her that she had Invasive Ductal Carcinoma, which is breast cancer. Her next step was to visit an oncologist to find out more about her prognosis and treatment.
Arianne describes the three weeks between her diagnosis and the first appointment with her oncologist as some of the most challenging parts of her journey with cancer. “I was living in fear and uncertainty. Not knowing what was going to happen next was extremely stressful. How could this be happening to me? How will I tell my son? Will I see him go to his first day of middle school?”
On August 16th, her oncologist told her they had caught the cancer early – in stage one. Her treatment protocol to begin with was breast surgery, which she underwent two weeks later.
Arianne was fortunate to have had her cancer detected early, and she credits her screening mammogram as key in her good outcome. “If I waited to get screened, my outcome would have been very different”, she says.
Dr. Paula Gordon, radiologist, is a passionate advocate when it comes to breast cancer screening. She says that the early days of the pandemic are an example of the importance of early detection. Due to lack of personal protective equipment, asymptomatic women were not being screened, and this meant that “tiny cancers that would have been undetectable without screening got to grow”.
Stressing the importance of screening starting annually after the age of 40, Dr. Gordon notes that “when cancer is caught at stage one or zero, five year survival rate is 100%”.
It was after Arianne found out her prognosis and treatment plan that she managed to tell her son. “He asked me if I was going to die”, said Arianne, “all he ever knew about cancer was that people died from it”.
In the span of five weeks, Arianne had gone from a typical working person – a wife, mother, friend and daughter – to someone with cancer. “I was on autopilot” she said, “I tried my best to do what I needed to do – care for my son, cook dinner, do what I needed to do to maintain some sense of normalcy – all while navigating an increasing number of medical appointments and so much uncertainty. It took me a while before I told other people that weren’t in my inner circle. How do I tell people I have cancer when I'm still grappling with what that means for me and my future?”
September 7th, two weeks after her surgery, she met with her surgeon who told her that the cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes.