“Navigating my cancer treatment would have been a lot easier if I’d had a family doctor”

In 2022, I was working as a logistics manager at a food production company. I loved my job and being a mom to my two daughters, who were seven and four at the time. I was a single parent, and I spent what free time I had dancing, reading and seeing my friends.

In September, I felt a pain in the right side of my chest that kept coming and going. I didn’t have a family doctor—I had joined Health Care Connect, the province-wide waiting list, six years earlier but hadn’t had any luck—so I started by looking up my symptoms online. Other than the pain, I didn’t have any of the typical signs listed for breast cancer, such as redness, puckering or a lump. But, for Black women, redness doesn’t really apply. I thought one of my breast ducts might be infected, but I didn’t think it was cancer.

Read more: Dispatches from Ontario’s broken health care system

About two weeks later, I went to a local walk-in clinic to get checked out. Even though I showed up 15 minutes before the clinic opened at 9 a.m., there were many people ahead of me, and the staff told me to go home. I came back a few more times on subsequent days or called the minute they opened, but I never got to see a doctor.

After three weeks, I gave up and headed to the ER at Ajax Pickering Hospital. By that point, the pain was constant and I had a lump. I waited eight hours to see a doctor and have a scan. The hospital called me the next day and told me to come in for a biopsy; the scan was showing a large mass in my right breast.

I was at home when I got the call about the results. I had an aggressive form of breast cancer called invasive ductal carcinoma. It was Stage 4 and had already spread to my lungs. I cried for a bit but worked through my emotions quickly so I could focus on moving forward.

Over the following eight months, I underwent 13 rounds of chemotherapy along with immuno­therapy. There’s no other way to put it: chemo sucks. I experienced severe joint pain, fatigue and brain fog. I also lost my hair. I finished the chemo in July of 2023, but I’m still on immunotherapy—with side effects that include joint locking, joint pain and fatigue—and will be for the foreseeable future. My condition is considered stable: the tumours aren’t growing, but they’re not shrinking either.

My rent when I got sick was $2,000 a month in addition to my car payments—things I could afford when I was working, but not once I lost my income. I nearly got evicted because I was behind on my rent. My family and friends started a GoFundMe after my diagnosis, which raised around $27,000. For a while, that money helped me pay bills, including medical expenses not covered by OHIP. I lived off savings until this past August, when I was finally approved for disability benefits.

I’m still looking for a family doctor for myself and my daughters. My cancer was aggressive, but I think having a doctor would have changed my outcome. I could have received a diagnosis at Stage 1 or even before it became a problem at all. And navigating my treatment would have been a lot easier if I’d had someone to advocate for me. Black women tend to have denser breast tissue than white women, which is one of the factors putting us at higher risk for breast cancer. If I had a physician, I might have been able to get regular mammograms.

I want to focus on living with cancer, not the possibility of dying from it. My daughters know I have cancer, but they’re too young to understand how serious my illness is. I have taught them to put their faith in a higher power. I’ve asked my doctors not to talk to me about how much time I have left. They say there’s only a 26 per cent chance I will still be alive in five years, but they’re not God.