DESCRIPTION
Christine Handy withstood osteomyelitis in her right arm, a lumpectomy, two mastectomies and a MRSA infection en route to surviving HER2+ breast cancer. It wasn’t easy, but her road to survivorship included a 28-round chemotherapy regimen with herceptin and taxol. She has gone on to resume her career as a runway model, author, film producer and motivational speaker.
In addition to being a runway model and the other of small children, Christine Handy of Miami, Florida enjoyed an active lifestyle that included tennis and surfing. However, at age 42, while showering she discovered a lump on her chest. At the same time, she noticed her hair thinning and a loss of appetite. This led to her diagnosis of breast cancer.
Her diagnosis of HER2+ breast cancer necessitated the usage of the drug herceptin, which added 12 rounds of chemotherapy. Combined with taxol, Christine went through 28 rounds of chemo covering a grueling 15 months.
Christine Handy’s cancer journey involved problems other than cancer. She was also dealing with osteomyelitis, a bone infection in her right arm, which required a picc line into the arm for about six weeks. At the time Christine was diagnosed with cancer, her right arm had just been reconstructed from cadaver bones and bone grafts. Doctors agreed that Christine started breast cancer-related chemotherapy right away, it would dissolve the bone grafts in her reconstructed arm. Her oncologist said it would be better to perform a lumpectomy, without chemo, which would not adversely affect the procedure done on her arm.
It was about a month when chemotherapy began, which would require one mastectomy in 2013, and a second one at a later time. The chemo left Christine very frail and thin, weighing about 90 pounds. She was very ill and that resulted in the second mastectomy not taking place until 2016.
The second mastectomy had its challenges. The second procedure involved implants needed several revisions, six in all, which were both painful and frustrating.
There was more pain and frustration for Christine Handy when she learned she had a MRSA infection on her implant. This infection, originally diagnosed as a staph infection, had her in and out of the hospital for an additional three months.
Even after her chemotherapy treatment ended, there were other problems. She lost a few teeth, had a liver spot and had to see a heart doctor, which she does to this day. Christine said it wasn’t until four years her chemo concluded that she started feeling like herself again.
Christine is back to modeling and helping women. She urges anyone on a cancer journey should not try to do so alone.
Additional Resources:
Christine’s Book: Walk Beside Me, available on Amazon
Christine’s Film: Hello, Beautiful https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9018874/
Christine’s Website: https://www.christinehandy.com
Support Group: https://www.learnlooklocate.com
TRANSCRIPT
Bruce Morton: This is the Cancer Interviews podcast, and I’m your host, Bruce Morton. Our guest on this episode not only survived a multi-layered journey with breast cancer, but has taken elements of her past and put them into a book designed to aid the present and future for women diagnosed with breast cancer. Christine Handy of Miami, Florida has a message that is equal parts powerful and unique. Now it is time to hear her story, and Christine, welcome to Cancer Interviews.
Christine Handy: Thank you for having me.
BM: Christine, we’re going to start the way we always start, and that is to learn about you, exclusive of your involvement with cancer. So, if you would, tell us about where you are from, what you have done for work and what you for fun.
CH: Originally, I am from St. Louis. I am a Midwestern girl. Then I moved to Dallas and lived there for several years. Now I am in Miami, Florida. A different landscape. I am a motivational speaker. I am a model. I have been a model for more than 40 years. I am the author of a book, “Walk Beside Me.” I am also the producer of a film called, “Hello, Beautiful.” I am a social media influencer. I try to use my post-traumatic wisdom to help the world. I am a mentor to breast cancer patients. I am on the board of three non-profits, and every day that I wake up I get to help other people and give people hope. On a personal level, I love to play tennis, I love to walk, I love to be outdoors and I love to surf. But my heart and my joy is helping other women.
BM: For all of us who have survived cancer, there came that juncture in which some phase of your health became abnormal, to the extent that it merited medical attention, which triggered a diagnosis of cancer. For you, when and how did that moment materialize?
CH: In October 2012, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. It was triple-positive Stage 2B, they called it. Subsequently, I went through 28 rounds of chemotherapy over the course of 15 months. This required numerous surgeries, a lumpectomy, and then two mastectomies.
BM: Let’s talk about the first phase of all this. What was the first thing you noticed that wasn’t quite right?
CH: My health symptoms. My hair was thinning, I had a loss of appetite. I was really very tired, which for me was quite a shock. I am a self-proclaimed athlete, so to be that winded at age 42 seemed really odd. I found a lump in my chest when in the shower, thankfully, or it could have been undiagnosed for even longer. It never really occurred to me that I could be diagnosed with breast cancer at all in my life. I have no family history of breast cancer. So, especially at that age I wasn’t looking for breast cancer to be the reason for those symptoms.
BM: Each person’s cancer journey is a bit different for a number of reasons. Different diagnoses provide different amounts of treatment options. In your case, did you have treatment options?
CH: I had a lot of treatment. Part of my cancer was HER2+ and for HER2+, you really need a drug called herceptin, which added 12 rounds of chemotherapy to my regimen. Did I consider it an option? No, because I had to do this to survive this. I had young kids, and I needed to be their mother; but the regimen required me to do what they call the ‘red devil’, plus taxol and the herceptin, which was over the course of about 15 months.
BM: Christine, we have heard from people who have said the thought of dealing with chemotherapy was worse than the treatment itself. Where your regimen was concerned, what was tougher, the physical part or the mental part?
CH: I think ultimately, the emotional space is tougher because the physical part of chemotherapy ended, but the emotional part stays. There is this mentality of not trying to have the fear stay with you for years and years. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, a friend of mine’s mother was a survivor. I called her one day and I asked, “When does the fear end?” I was so frightened about that diagnosis. She said, “I’ll let you know.” And she was ten years cancer-free. That didn’t sound very hopeful to me, so I really wanted to work on the fear, and that’s the emotional side of it. I just started to focus on the hope and tried to eliminate the fear aspect, and it took a long time, but I feel like I have nailed that part of it.
BM: We’re confident you’ll be able to learn some tips and tools to help you through your personal cancer journey, but first we’d like to invite you to please give us a ‘like,’ leave a comment or review below and share this story with your friends. Kindly click on the Subscribe button below and click on the bell icon, so you’ll be notified the next time we release a cancer interview. And if you hear a loved one are facing a cancer diagnosis, please click on the link in the Description and Show Notes below to check out our free guide, “The Top Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I First Got Cancer.” Finally, we want to remind you Cancer Interviews is not a purveyor of medical advice. If you seek medical advice, please consult a licensed health care professional.
Your journey started out with a lumpectomy and not long after that you found yourself needing a mastectomy. What was the chain of events that led from one to the other?
CH: Ironically, I had had an arm issue the year prior to cancer. I had an infection in my right arm called osteomyelitis, it is a bone infection that is really difficult to get rid of. I had a picc line for a really long time, about six weeks, I think. So, when I was originally diagnosed with cancer, my right arm had just been reconstructed quite literally from cadaver bones and bone grafts. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, my arm doctor and my oncologist had conversations and they agreed that if I started chemo right away, the work on my arm and the bone grafts would have dissolved. So, basically I had two health issues going on at the same time. My oncologist said let’s start out with a lumpectomy, let’s get the cancer out to see if there is any lymph node involvement, which would buy some time before any chemotherapy is started because it couldn’t be started at that time. About a month after that, we started chemotherapy knowing that ultimately I would have to have a mastectomy. We just did the lumpectomy to buy some time.
BM: How did treatment go with the first mastectomy?
CH: It was fine. I had an expander put in, but I was just violently ill from the chemotherapy in March 2013, and my doctor said he wouldn’t do a double mastectomy at this point. It is a bigger surgery, and it is harder on your system. I was very frail and very thin. I think I was about 90 pounds, almost five-nine. Just the physical illness and the ramifications of the chemo were so great that it was better to just push off the second mastectomy until I was healthy and stronger, which ultimately I did not do until 2016.
BM: You had been through a lumpectomy and a first mastectomy. How did the second one go?
CH: As far as mastectomies go, it was fine. It was obviously physically challenging. I had an expander put in and an implant at the time. Ultimately, my implants were excavated for another reason. I had a couple revisions. You know, when you have a vacant space in your chest, the implant moves around. For me, it took several revisions and different implants to get that implant to stay in place because it is very painful when those implants move around in your vacant chest. I think I had three revisions per side to get out of that pain. You know, it’s funny. You think a mastectomy, with extenders and an implant, it solves the problem, but there are other problems involved. I wasn’t warned about that. There are just things that come up.
BM: You have sounded very positive and strong in terms of dealing with the mental and emotional aspect of this. At that point, how strong were you mentally and emotionally?
CH: At the beginning of my diagnosis, I was completely sideswiped. Again, I already had this arm issue, and I wasn’t very trusting of the medical system. That put me in a place of vulnerability because now I was having to find all these new doctors and an oncologist. Fortunately, I found an oncologist that I trusted very much. So, I wouldn’t say that mentally I was in a good state of mind. I had lost a lot of trust in the medical world, and I was feeling quite a lot of despair. I wasn’t very much cheering for myself and I wasn’t really accepting a lot of care at the time. I was isolating myself and that quickly changed. Once I started with chemotherapy, I needed a lot of help and I needed a lot of help with my children. But again, in the beginning I felt a lot of despair, and I was quite disillusioned and really, in quite a lot of shock.
BM: The answer to this question runs the gamut. We hear from guests who were starving for support, and we have heard from those who had no shortage of family and friends rallying to their side. At this very difficult time, Christine, how much support did you get?
CH: Fortunately, I picked the right friends. I had a mountain of support. I had my parents who didn’t live in the same city, but they came in a lot. They came in for the meaningful appointments and meaning surgeries; but I also had a mountain of women show up and I realized then how important community in cancer is, because had those not shown up for me time and time again, and month after month, then I would have stayed in this space of fear and isolation, but they really got me out of that and they taught me that they would never forsake me. For 15 months, they showed up on some level every single day. It is so critical to help people during that time of despair, there is really nothing like physical and mental support.
BM: I want to talk about one other part of your cancer journey, then turn to the more positive part of your experience. Doing a little research on your story, I learned that one of the things you had to deal with. Of all the interviews we have done, not once have we heard about this ingredient, but you had to deal with a MRSA infection. How did that come about and how much of a setback was it?
CH: I had a MRSA infection in my implant, and that was quite a setback. It as during COVID, it was years after my breast cancer and the MRSA infection was very serious. I really thought my illness journey was done after my breast cancer, and sure enough this news sideswiped me.
BM: Did you ever learn the source of the MRSA infection?
CH: I really didn’t know, and doctors didn’t know. This infection kept them guessing. That was exactly what they said. I had been in and out of the hospital for three months with that infection and they were treating me for a staph infection. Sometimes if you are treated for a staph infection and the medication is not correct, if it is trail and error, it can become a MRSA infection, which ultimately mine did.
BM: Now, I want to get to a more pleasant part of this story. Christine, when did you sense your health was taking a turn for the better?
CH: It took a while. I had some other ramifications from chemotherapy. After my chemo, I lost a few teeth, I had a liver spot, I had to see a heart doctor, which I still do, so I feel like there was collateral damage that was done to my body. Chemo attacks cancer cells, but it also attacks good cells. I didn’t feel well for quite some time. I think four years after chemo concluded was when I started to feel like myself again.
BM: When you felt like yourself again, could you resume modeling?
CH: I did resume modeling and I still have a modeling career. I went back to the modeling industry because I wanted to show women that our self esteem is an inside job. It is our responsibility. Our physical appearance is not what we should depend on. When I started modeling as a young child, I was dependant very much on my physical appearance. I realized quickly after my diagnosis that your physical appearance cannot save your life. It doesn’t really matter. It is how you feel about yourself inside. Self-esteem is your responsibility, not society’s.
BM: The book that you wrote is titled, “Walk Beside Me,” so we want to learn more about that. First off, what inspired you to write this book?
CH: When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was gifted a lot of books. Most of them were self-help-related or spiritual-related, but I wanted to read a narrative that was a novel about somebody’s journey through breast cancer. I wanted to see the good, the bad and the ugly. I didn’t have contemporaries that had had breast cancer, so I just sought films and TV shows about breast cancer and books, and just wasn’t finding what I wanted to find. So, I thought if once I am healthy, if I have the courage, that maybe I will write my story, and it could help somebody else.
BM: One might think there is no connectivity between modeling and a breast cancer journey and a book, but in fact you have shown those three are in fact dots that can be connected.
CH: I was really fixated on the external. I was fixated on materialism and what society thought of me. I was fixated on my career. I learned those things can all be taken away, and so when those things are taken away, I did some introspective work to learn who I really was. For so many years, it was about the external and not the internal. When I was diagnosed, I thought maybe other people thought the same way. I thought maybe my self esteem should be so shaken because of loss of hair and loss of what I looked like on the outside. Maybe if I would have thought about self-care, maybe I would have taken less of a fall. After my treatment concluded, I saw people on social media who thought the same way as me, and I thought maybe I could save them with this book. Then I decided to go back to modeling because I thought wouldn’t it make a splash if I walked out on New York Fashion Week with a concave chest to so show that my self esteem had nothing to do with my illness or the excavation of my chest. My self-esteem was my responsibility, and was my job to make sure it was stable.
BM: Christine, we are going to wrap up now, but will ask if there is one point you get across in your book, “Walk Beside Me,” one thing you would want to make sure the reader remembers and takes with them, what would that be?
CH: I think in the beginning of my journey I was really hesitant to ask for help. I think in society we are taught that we can do anything, we can do it alone. The cancer journey shouldn’t be traveled through, alone. I would say get rid of the ego that says that you are tough, and you can do it. We’re all tough, but doing it alone is not a great idea. Once I left my ego and pride behind, I was able to accept health from other people. And the other thing I say is, give yourself the grace you give other people. Once you give yourself, your life really can change.
BM: Christine, thanks very much for some wise words. Thanks for being with us on Cancer Interviews.
CH: Thank you.
BM: And as we conclude, we will remind you as we always do, that if you or a loved one are on a cancer journey, you are not alone. There are people like Christine Handy who have words, messages and information that can ease your journey. So, until next time, we will see you on down the road.
Additional Resources:
Christine’s Book: Walk Beside Me, available on Amazon.
Christine’s Film: Hello, Beautiful https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9018874/
Christine’s Website: https://www.christinehandy.com
Support Group: https://www.learnlooklocate,com
SHOW NOTES
TITLE: Christine Handy – Breast Cancer Survivor – Miami, Florida, USA
A print and runway model, Christine Handy withstood a lumpectomy, two mastectomies and a MRSA infection, plus a chemotherapy regimen featuring Herceptin and Taxol to survive HER2+ breast cancer. That inspired her to write a book, “Walk Beside Me,” and to produce a film, “Hello, Beautiful.”
Additional Resources:
Christine’s Website: https://www.christinehandy.com
Christine’s Book, available on Amazon: “Walk Beside Me”
Christine’s Film: “Hello, Beautiful” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9018874/
Support Group: https://www.learnlooklocate.com
Time Stamps:
03:21 Christine found a lump in her chest while in the shower, which led to a diagnosis of breast cancer.
04:17 Describes her chemotherapy regimen.
05:08 The emotional toll of cancer was worse than the treatment.
07:10 Christine said detection of osteomyelitis, an infection in her arm played a role in her needing a lumpectomy prior to undergoing a mastectomy.
08:41 Describes her first mastectomy treatment.
09:40 Describes her second mastectomy treatment.
13:49 In addition to cancer, she had to deal with a MRSA infection.
16:46 Said there was collateral damage from chemo.
21:42 Christine reveals the most important she makes in her book.
KEYWORDS (tags):
her2+ breast cancer
herceptin
taxol
lumpectomy
christine handy
osteomyelitis
mastectomy
picc line
bruce morton
mrsa
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