General Mills Employee Shares Cancer Journey To Help Others
At M Health Fairview Cancer Center in Edina, Stacy Caldwell recently started a new Monday tradition.
“It’s definitely not a fun thing to be doing, but it’s necessary to get better,” said Caldwell, as she sat covered in blankets with ice packs over her hands and feet.
For a whole hour, she sits as a drug called Taxol drips into her veins.
“It’ll go into my system, into my blood, so that it can attack the cell, the cancer cells,” she said.
Caldwell has done this now for the past nine weeks. But before chemotherapy, her life looked much different. She was a seemingly healthy, active and successful 34-year-old woman with an affinity for pickleball and a thriving career at General Mills in Golden Valley.
“Being diagnosed was a complete shock,” she said. “I didn’t have any symptoms really, other than a lump on my right breast that just started growing over the course of a couple months.”
A nurse at M Health Fairview Cancer Center in Edina prepares Stacy Caldwell for chemotherapy.
She says she noticed the lump in May and decided to get it checked later in the summer. The official diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer came on Aug. 5.
“It’s the HER2+, which is fast and aggressive, and those seem to affect younger women too I’ve noticed,” Caldwell said during an interview at her home in Minnetonka.
In the weeks since her diagnosis, she’s made a point to not let her cancer define her.
She had a head shaving party with family and friends, and while sporting a new wig, she danced the night away at a recent gala to raise money for metastatic breast cancer research.
“Try to live as normally as I can with, you know, not just sitting back and letting the treatment, and what this is doing, to take me over,” said Caldwell. “But really getting out there and doing the things that I love.”
Caldwell says she’s still processing the weight of this news. But she thought it was important to speak out about her condition.
“For me it’s turning pain into purpose,” she said. “I really want to help other people through this. Because I look at it as, I had no idea of metastatic breast cancer, the severity of it, how it can affect younger women.”
She created a CaringBridge page where she posts frequent updates on her journey — the good and the bad.
“The unfortunate thing is you really don’t know the cause of how this has happened, and that’s going to be a question I think everyone’s going to wonder forever,” she said.
Back at M Health Fairview, she’s halfway through an 18-week treatment program. During her ninth treatment, she was joined by her dad, Bob Caldwell, who flew up from New Mexico.
“It’s kind of nice not to feel alone going through treatment and to have someone, whether it’s family or friends by my side,” she said. “Someone to talk to, to make my time go by faster as well.”
A photo from Caldwell’s CaringBridge page from her first chemotherapy treatment.
While it would be easy for Caldwell to get down on herself, she says that’s not the life she wants to live.
“I mean I’ve faced a few challenges in life, and you know, this is just another challenge,” she said.
Caldwell has set up a GoFundMe page to help cover her medical bills. Meanwhile, she says the one message she’d like to share is, if you notice something is off, go to the doctor and get checked.
Related: ‘There’s Still Hope’: Woman Recounts Breast Cancer Battle
