Heather Von St. James: Why I Fight

“Was your dad a miner or did he work in construction of any kind?”

These are not the typical questions that you get from your doctor when you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer. But I was being asked those questions for a reason. I was 36 years old and found out I had a nefarious and rare cancer called mesothelioma, the cancer almost always caused by asbestos exposure.

I had never worked with asbestos myself, but yes, my dad had. See, he WAS a construction worker, and most of what he did in his first few years while learning the trade was drywall cleanup and demolition. Much of the drywall joint compound he worked with contained asbestos. Most of the buildings he worked in doing demolition contained asbestos tiles on the floor and in the ceiling. The insulation around pipes and boilers that he tore out was all asbestos insulation.

He would come home from work many days covered in dust, a thick, greyish-white crust covering his work jacket. A jacket I would wear to do my outside chores. A jacket I would put on to go out to the rabbit hutch in the back shed to feed and play with my rabbits. A jacket I would wear because it didn’t matter if it got dirty.

This jacket had asbestos dust all over it. His car had the same dust in it. The dust was just part of my childhood. This dust caused my illness. I thought asbestos had been banned years ago. I was shocked to learn this substance that knowingly causes a horrible cancer and so many health problems had indeed not been banned.

Here I was 36 years old, a new mom with a three-and-a-half-month-old baby at home, and I was being told I had probably 15 months to live if I didn’t do something drastic. My doctor laid out some options for me. The first was do nothing and maybe live 15 months, which was not an option with a new baby. The second option given was chemo and radiation, and hopefully make it 5 years.

The third option was an incredibly invasive surgery called an extrapleural pneumonectomy. This surgery entailed the removal of my entire left lung that was affected by the cancer, the lining of the lung, the left half of my diaphragm, the lining of my heart – both of which would be replaced with Gore-Tex – and then the removal of one or two ribs. This option afforded me the best prognosis: 7-10 years of survival, more if I was one of the lucky ones. Knowing now that mesothelioma usually kills its victims within the first 5 years, this option sounded like the best one to me.

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