Brownsville patient advocate reflects on surviving breast cancer

Dr. Beverly A. Zavaleta’s journey since surviving breast cancer nearly a decade ago has taken a few unexpected turns and contained hidden gems and insights.

Zavaleta is a Harvard-educated family medicine specialist and longtime patient advocate at Valley Baptist Medical Center-Brownsville. In May 2015, she was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly aggressive form of the disease.

Two weeks later she started a five-month regimen of chemo treatments.

Afterward, and at the urging of a friend who Zavaleta helped through a breast cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy, she wrote a book about the experience: “Braving Chemo: What to Expect, How to Prepare and How to Get Through It,” published in 2019.

“Braving Chemo” is available online, and locally in the gift shops at VBMC Brownsville and Harlingen.

“The book is not breast cancer specific. This is a book about chemotherapy, for anyone undergoing chemo for any type of cancer,” Zavaleta said in an interview with The Brownsville Herald earlier this week.

“There’s several phases to it. 2015 and 2016 were really dedicated to basically the fight for your life phase. I had a very grueling chemo regimen, pretty intense surgeries. I was completely out of work for 11 months because of that. I had really bad side effects to the chemo,” she said, adding that for her, recovery came in phases.

At first, “it was back and forth to appointments. I was immuno suppressed. I was quarantined before anybody even knew what a quarantine was … punctuated by periods of kind of doing nothing. I wasn’t working, couldn’t even go to the grocery store for a week at a time because my blood counts were really low. So there was, weirdly, all this time to reflect and stew in my own juices,” she said.

“And then also, I got to spend a whole lot of time with my kids because they were little and part of that time was the summertime, and so, weirdly, there was this gift of time with them.”

“People tend to pinkwash the whole experience as if it was all good. It isn’t. I think what it is is something unexpectedly positive hiding in something that’s overwhelmingly negative. It’s like a little hidden treasure, hidden basically in this junk pile, right. Things like sitting in my backyard enjoying the lush tropical greenery, having a cup of tea. It’s so peaceful, enjoying the fall weather because I couldn’t go to work, I could barely walk, and yet, all these beautiful things are happening. … So, there was that.”

“And then in 2016, I got enough better, I had a couple surgeries, I had severe, severe peripheral neuropathy, which affects the nerves and the muscles, I could barely walk for a couple of months. But then as I did get enough better, I did go back to work,” she said.

EARLY RECOVERY

“And then the next phase is early recovery, and that was still really hard because I was so fatigued, still really tired. I had a lot of pain, a lot of weakness, but glad to be alive and glad to be able to go to work. My cancer was in remission, like no detectable cancer, which is great.”

“I felt like I probably bought myself five years, so I had this kind of like just got out of prison energy, so that’s actually what I did, planned a whole bunch of vacations with the kids. I’ve never brought my kids to my hometown of Ithaca, N.Y. So, took a trip there, visited some friends there. The next summer took the kids to New York City, then next to Boston, which is where I went to school. Started checking off the bucket list, aggressively checking off the bucket list. I was still getting screenings, blood work, so then the roller coaster starts.

THE ROLLER COASTER

“It usually starts six months to a year, it’s different for everybody,” Zavaleta said.

“So, wait a minute, I love this sort of just got out of prison high, and then you kind of crash. You go oh, wait a minute, you mean I’m never getting off the roller coaster. There’s this realization that you’re never getting off the cancer roller coaster, you’re on. You bought a lifetime ticket, baby.”

“You will always have tests and follow-ups for the rest of your life. Any time something hurts, you will think it’s cancer coming back, and you will have to follow it up and go to your doctor. It literally will follow you in real time. There’s no getting off,” she said.

Zavaleta said cancer recovery manifests itself differently in everybody.

“Even for the people that have zero side effects, even for them, if they have a pain that’s not going away, they have to go get checked to see if their cancer has come back. And that is what never, ever, ever, ever goes away. That’s the roller coaster,” she said.

Zavaleta said she eventually realized she would have to build a new life.

“I actually have permanent disabilities that have changed the way I have to do things, and there are things, you know, that I never will be able to do again, because I still have neuropathy. That’s the major one for me, and I have osteopedia and I’ve had fractures. … My physical functioning has limitations.”

“This is where I say no, cancer is not a gift. Cancer is a thief. It’s taken all these things from me and I’m going to try to win them back. I don’t want to just survive. I don’t want to just be alive.”

Zavaleta is on Facebook via Beverly A. Zavaleta MD; her website at beverlyzavaletamd.com and on Instagram and Twitter/X @BZavaletaMD