Hilary goes surfing

Hilary Duda had seen enough. It was time to get involved. Her neighbor had been building these wonderful surfboards, heroic planks 12 feet in length that promised a smooth ride across the waves. It wouldn’t really be surfing, though, since you paddle, pressed to the board, the whole time. Still, having grown up alongside the ocean in Ireland, having swum in the sea her entire life, at 60 she was game. She had to try it.

When they set out to travel all the way from 13th Street in Carmel to Pebble Beach and back, head up and paddling, her neighbor promised Duda would be sore.

“Oh no, I won’t,” she said.

Oh yes, she was. The next morning, Duda’s chest was sore at the sternum, right where she had strained against the board. There was also a lump. But just a tiny one. She figured she’d broken a blood vessel and decided to keep an eye on it for a few weeks.

It didn’t go away.

When the needle biopsy did not come out clear, her doctor hoped it was a cyst but sent Duda to the Breast Care Center in Monterey for a diagnosis from specialist doctors Susan Roux and Pamela Craig.

“They had done a mammogram on me just six months prior,” says Duda, “and it was clear.”

This time it was not.

Still, it was inconclusive, the lump too high on the film to get a good look. Roux did a sonogram and confirmed, “Yes, this is cancer.”

It was hard to believe.

“But it’s not going to kill you,” Roux said.

Hilary was willing to believe that.

Turns out it was a rare form of cancer, usually found in younger women and only around 3 percent to 4 percent of the time, Duda remembers. Amazingly, her sister had experienced something very similar the year before in Paris. Breast cancer, in the same place, equally rare but different. Her sister had done well.

Duda’s treatment began with surgery to remove the cancer, followed by a sentinel node biopsy to determine whether the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. If after injecting a dye into the neighboring lymph nodes, her doctors found the first, or sentinel, node negative for cancer cells, they could determine with sufficient assurance that her cancer had not spread.

Although the sentinel node was negative, three lymph nodes were removed to be sure. Duda was left with minimal discomfort, only brief numbing of the area, and good range of motion in her shoulder and arm. Absent the sentinel node biopsy, Duda’s sister in Paris had 12 to 15 nodes removed, even though all were negative, leaving her with limited range of motion, lymph drainage problems, and edema, or swelling, of the arm.

“My sister was told she would never play tennis again,” Hilary says. “I simply asked how long, and they told me to give the site a few days to heal before I resumed my game. I have very good range of motion, which I attribute to my procedure and to my yoga classes, which I returned to quickly. It was a little hard at first, but the gentle stretches were just what I needed. And my incision healed beautifully.”

Then came the chemotherapy. Two doses, four rounds each.

“I learned the chemo wouldn’t guarantee me much of an edge,” she says. “But, when I met with Dr. Pamela Craig, director of the Breast Care Center, and Dr. Jerry Rubin, a Monterey oncologist, and we discussed the benefits of it, and I thought, what if, 10 years from now, the cancer recurs and I say, ‘Wow, if only I’d had the chemo’? I saw how well my sister had done with it and decided any edge was worth it.”

What she didn’t know was how hard it would be.

“I know everybody’s different,” she says, “but the first round was really tough on my stomach. You want to believe in this, you think you can do this, you tell yourself you’re going to be fine, but I was so sick I could only take three rounds of the first dose before moving on to the second. I had to take four months off from work.

“And so you pray, however you pray, with your different forms of prayer. And some prayers mean just being absolutely still, which is a fine prayer because that’s all you can manage sometimes. I know people who do wonderfully with chemotherapy. But it hit me hard, and I was glad when it was over.”

Hilary Duda (middle) rings the bell three times to signal the end of her radiation treatment. She is joined by former hospital employee Melissa Stegbuchner (left) and employee Connie victorine (right).

And then her hair disappeared. That soft Irish red that had added so much.

“What didn’t come out on its own,” she says, “my son removed with a buzz cut. We had a good laugh; what else can you do? And so, you wear a wig. There’s a place downstairs in the hospital where you can try on 50 wigs. They put wigs on me and I looked like an Irish setter. They’d apologize for laughing, but I thought it was funny too.”

Hilary finally chose a wig and wore it to a party. Throughout the evening, people who didn’t know her said her hair was absolutely beautiful. And she believed them. She liked the boost it gave her, liked the red tones she’d chosen, just a little brighter than her own.

Radiation treatments followed her chemotherapy. What Duda likes to remember most about the experience is the way she was treated during her daily doses.

“I had to go in for radiation every day except Saturday and Sunday,” she says. “They said cancer cells don’t grow on the weekends. They have it down, not just to a science but also to an art. They greet you so nicely there and have a jigsaw puzzle in case you have to wait. They were always cheerful and never hurried. It was a wonderful experience. It’s a funny thing to say since I was sicker than sick, but it was.”

Hilary’s best moment was the morning she got to ring the bell three times, signaling she had completed her treatment.

“It sounds a bit corny,” she says, “but it’s actually lovely. It’s closure. The staff gathers around and congratulates you for making it through. I don’t think I’m to be admired; I’m privileged to be exposed to so many fine people, not just because they’re professionals who are on the cutting edge of technology and do their job extremely well, but because they treat their patients as people. To be smart and have the ability to nurse somebody through a serious illness, well that’s something indeed.”