Woman uses humor to cope with struggles of breast cancer
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BY ERIN ANDERSEN / Lincoln Journal Star
Cancer is no laughing matter. But laughter is good for fighting cancer. Kim Heier is living proof.
The Doane College liberal arts instructor was diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago, at the age of 37.
She lost her hair.
She lost her left breast.
But she kept her quirky sense of humor.
And she discovered her “inner cleavage.”
Heier will help other women battling breast cancer find theirs during the annual BryanLGH Medical Center National Breast Cancer Awareness luncheon on Oct. 18.
Cancer is not funny, Heier said. But humor gets you through the icky stuff: The hair loss. The chemo brain. The unbearable constipation they neglect to warn you about. The humiliation of baring your breasts to roomfuls of strangers with the same air of indifference as you have walking outside barefoot. The insidious feeling that losing a breast leaves you less of a woman.
“I have the utmost respect for cancer, and I am thankful I am still here. There are many women who are not. I never want to make light of that fact,” Heier said.
“But I think seeing the lighter side of life has boded well with cancer.”
And so she wisecracks her way through her story.
It was July 2002. Heier was recently divorced, raising her 5½-year-old son, Simeon “Sim,” and working full time as dean of students at Doane College in Crete.
She found the lump during a routine self breast exam.
“Oooh, that’s not right,” she recalled thinking. “I told myself, ‘I will let one day go by and if nothing changes I’ll go to the doctor.’”
She spent a lot of time that day surreptitiously feeling her breast and the lump.
“The next day I plowed my way into the doctor’s office,” she said.
He ordered a mammogram —her rite of passage into the annual “smashing of the breast.”
“I knew it was cancer,” she said. The technicians “knew I knew.”
But she had to wait for the biopsy results to make it official.
“It was worse than waiting for a boy to call,” she deadpanned.
When the phone finally did ring, she heard the word “malignant.”
Her parents, Paul and Marley Ann Opsahl, were waiting for her downstairs.
“I thought about lying to them and saying, ‘It’s OK, it was a just ball of yarn that got stuck during home ec in high school,’” Heier said.
She told them the truth.
Two days later she told her ex-husband.
Then she told Sim.
“I told him there was a ball in my left breast and I needed surgery to get it out, because it was not supposed to be there.
“I told him, ‘I will be sick for a while. I will not be myself. I will be tired. I love you,’” Heier recalled.
Sim’s eyes were wide.
“Oh, there is ball in there? Can I have it to play with when they take it out?”
Then he asked permission to go out and play.
“That made me laugh,” she said. “That was normalcy. … It felt good to be normal.”
Doctors hoped to perform a lumpectomy but the mass was too large. She needed a mastectomy.
Cancer was terrifying. But losing an entire breast?!
The breast is more than a body part. It’s part of a woman’s identity, her femininity, her womanliness, Heier said.
“As a single woman, I steeled myself to the fact that there would be no more free drinks off them,” she joked.
Always “an over achiever,” she said, she had not one, but two forms of breast cancer — ductal carcinoma in situ (nonspreading) and invasive ductal carcinoma (spreading).
There were setbacks and infections.
Her breast was reconstructed through the “tramflap procedure” in which the abdomen is opened from hip to hip and stomach muscle is stretched up into the chest and wrapped around itself to form a new breast.
“It was hard to recover from,” Heier said.
But …
“It worked!” To prove her point she sticks out her chest and grins. “It feels like a natural breast.”
It will be another 10 months before she receives the official declaration of “cancer free.” But so far, so good. Her son is 10. She’s remarried, and has three stepchildren.
“All told, it was really hard,” she said of her cancer battle.
“Through it all, laughter really sustained me. It also puts other people at ease with a very uncomfortable and upsetting time.”
She giggles as she recalls some of the funniest moments.
Take the time she was laid out on her stomach, her left breast cupped and inserted in an opening in a long, cold table. The table was raised, and the doctor went underneath and used lasers and long needles to pinpoint the tumor.
“I felt like a cow, and he was going to milk me,” she recalled.
“So I mooed.
“No one said a word,” she said. “I thought, ‘Did no one just hear me moo?’ Then I mooed even louder. The nurses roared and the doctor was bawling so hard he had to take a minute and regroup and made me promise not to moo anymore.”
Her friends were just as irreverent.
When she started chemotherapy, medical staff suggested she bring a stuffed animal, a favorite blanket, a cherished picture or some kind of warm fuzzy to get her through it.
“It kind of wigged me out,” she confessed. She planned to go fuzzy-free to chemo.
Until her co-workers surprised her with a special brown-bag gift — their idea of an appropriate chemo ball.
Inside was a stuffed rooster with “nasty feathers.”
Attached was a note: “This is ‘Chemo’ the fighting cock. You can’t beat cancer without a little cock.”
The rooster never missed a chemo treatment. It inspired a new tradition among other women fighting cancer — crowing “cock-a-doodle-doo” at the end of each round.
When her hair started falling out, she had a friend shave her head.
“I looked like Demi Moore in ‘G.I. Jane,’” she recalled.
The locks were gone, but the remaining fuzzy stubble continued to shed. Her friends tried removing it with a lint brush. Ultimately, they turned on the vacuum and sucked all the hair out of her head, earning her the nickname “Hoover Head.”
Laughter accompanied the tears, the frustration and anger.
“Along the way I realized I was more than a breast, I could buy my own drinks,” she said.
And she found her inner cleavage.
“Finding your inner cleavage is about finding that part inside of you that still makes you a woman,” she said. “It’s about helping you get your groove back, finding your mojo.”
So, how do you find it?
“Come to the luncheon and I will tell you,” Heier smirked.
Reach Erin Andersen at 473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com.
If you go
What: Finding Your Inner Cleavage, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month Luncheon featuring Kim Heier
When: 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Oct. 18
Where: Plaza Conference Center, BryanLGH Medical Center East, 1600 S. 48th St.
Tickets: $10 per person; preregistration required by Friday, call 481-8886 or log on to www.bryanlgh.org
Other breast cancer awareness events
* Breast Cancer Clinic — What You Need to Know, 6-8 p.m., Oct. 17, Saint Elizabeth Regional Medical Center. Free seminar and dinner buffet. Information on screening guidelines, risk factors, treatments and options for surgery and reconstruction. Registration required, call 219-7000.
* American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk, 1 p.m. Oct. 22, Holmes Park. Honor survivors, learn more about protecting yourself and raise money for breast cancer research and support. To register call 423-4888, log on to www.cancer.org/stridesonline or e-mail lincoln.strides@cancer.org.
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