Photo memoir offers courage and hope to overcome fear

SEELEY LAKE - As Randi de Santa Anna looked through the photographs her husband Juan took of their journey through breast cancer, the story was clear. She coupled her daily journal entries with his images creating an intimate and candid photo memoir of their experience, fears and the raw reality of the situation.

"Cancer's Eddy" brings the reader alongside the de Santa Annas as they weathered the storm of breast cancer. It is their hope that the book offers courage to men and women to help them face their fears of the unknown and choose the path of treatment that works best for them.

Randi adopted an organic lifestyle at the age of 23 after realizing processed foods were making people sick. Her father and grandfather each died from cancer in their 50s but she believed her diligence would keep her out of cancer's reach.

Unfortunately, this was not the case when in 2005 she was diagnosed and treated for melanoma. Three years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Randi searched to find photos of what her body would look like if she had a lumpectomy or a mastectomy. She couldn't find anything but clinical pictures.

"I wanted to prepare myself and figure out how to accept it if I had to go that route," said Randi. "For me, if I had found a book that just put it out there like [my] book does - here is what it is going to look like if you get your breast chopped off - I felt like that would have helped me."

Three days after removing a quarter of her left breast, Randi's doctor called to tell her she did not have any clear margins. Her surgeon recommended having the mastectomy because the cancer was really close to the chest wall. If she didn't get clear margins, she would have had to have chemo, something she desperately feared.

Early in Randi and Juan's relationship, he nicknamed her Eddy because of her tendency to swirl around and around when making a decision, like an eddy in a river. Randi writes in the book, "Eddies offer an opportunity to pause and consider one's course, which is good. Pausing can dilute the panic that accompanies a cancer diagnosis, enabling a less reactionary response. But eddies can also hold you in the spin cycle."

Her research had her spinning in circles of indecision exploring different treatment options and doctors until finding Dr. Judy Schmidt, a cancer specialist who was open to using alternative therapies. While Schmidt recommended the mastectomy saying it would increase her chance of living cancer free by 95 percent, she and her medical staff also offered Randi the feeling of freedom to choose her path of treatment.

Randi remembered the photo shoots the night before the lumpectomy and again the night before her mastectomy. As she grappled with the reality of the physical changes her body was about to undergo, Juan brought humor to the situation and his camera.

"It is not rude or insensitive. It is just what he does," said Randi.

Randi went through with the mastectomy. The next day she received the pathology report with clear margins all the way around. Five days after surgery, Juan and Randi celebrated by getting married after being engaged for almost five years.

"Cancer forged our relationship into something stronger and Juan and I now believed we had a good chance of surviving anything else that came along," wrote Randi in the book.

Even with financial assistance during the cancer, after things settled down the de Santa Annas had $350 to their name. They took a job as caretakers at Big Sky Lake, a privately owned lake, during the winter of 2009-2010. It was there that the vision of the book came to light.

"We just sort of stumbled on the overlap of photographs and text as a couple. That was the healing part of it," said Randi.

The de Santa Annas had no preconceived idea of writing a book. After looking through all the pictures Juan had taken, Randi saw the natural overlap with her journals and wanted to combine them for publication.

"I want to get this out there so someone can see these pictures because these pictures would have helped me. I wasn't interested in telling my story so much as showing the pictures," said Randi remembering her futile search for images. "The act of looking at the pictures and seeing things that he could see and I couldn't because I was in my skin, that part was really interesting for both of us."

She and Juan discussed whether they should show full breast shots in the book. Randi's daughter Mikaela Holmes convinced them, "'Mom, you are talking about something that you lost. To not show what you lost kind of defeats the point of the book,'" Randi recalled Holmes saying. "It is true. Here is what you look like with one. To pretend it is just about the non-one, it really does change the way you see yourself and feel through space and time."

Randi laughed and said, "It is a lot of information. I thought it would be awkward when men read the book but it is not. They read the book with such an open heart and a kindness. Maybe it is their mother, wife or daughter..."

"People fall in love with Randi and who she is. Once they see that and what she had gone through, I think it even lifts her higher in their eyes," said Juan. "I don't think people change how they feel about her if they were to look at these pictures. It is almost like a documentary in some ways."

Randi went through more than a dozen drafts before finally finishing the book "Cancer's Eddy." She reformatted it again making it into an ebook finishing it about a year and a half ago.

The consistent comment Randi has heard is the book is a love story and a story about how you can help someone if you have a loved one dealing with cancer. Juan said they have heard a lot of stories of men leaving their wives because they lost a breast.

"Our friendship and our relationship is what really pulled us through a lot of that," said Juan.

Also, sharing the outpouring of support from friends and family was a beautiful thing.

"People drop everything and they show up," said Randi. "That is when life feels like it should be."

Randi hopes the book provides courage to those who are fighting breast cancer while not saying "this is the way it is supposed to be done." While they were told in 2008 that one in seven women are diagnosed with breast cancer, the more people they meet, the more they feel the statistic is one in seven women don't have breast cancer.

"I hope it helps them have courage to go through all of the convolutions of everything they are feeling. I hope it gives them the courage to accept whatever changes they decide to go through with. I hope that they find someone who can be as supportive as Juan. And if they don't, I hope they dump whoever it is," said Randi.

Juan said for him the journey boiled down to fear.

"We fear all these things in our life and then something like this comes along and all those other fears [seem trivial]," said Juan. "This was fear – thinking about the ending of your life, me losing my best friend – it was just a fearful situation. Really [nothing] matters except life and love. Pursuit of happiness, that cliché thing, is actually kind of huge because you are either in fear or you are happy. Let's go with the happy part."

Randi and Juan have given countless copies away to cancer hospitals and individuals who have related to the book. While the hope to someday make a profit, the end goal was to make an impact.

"It has affected people. If we don't sell another one, we know it has already made an impact on one person's life. And that person's life is going to share it so it is going to snowball," said Juan. "Mission accomplished in some ways."

"Cancer's Eddy" is available at the Artists' Shop in Missoula and online at https://www.blurb.com/b/8830299-cancer-s-eddy as an e-book and print-on-demand.