Surivivor Stories: Christy Parrish on surrendering control, surviving breast cancer

Christy Parrish had no history of breast cancer in her family. Medical professionals had found a spot on her mammogram results several years before, but it had turned out to be nothing. So when a doctor found another spot on her screening mammogram and called her in for a diagnostic mammogram in 2018, Parrish wasn’t worried. This was normal, she thought.

But it turned out, it wasn’t. They told her she needed to come back for a biopsy, and then, the night before Thanksgiving, Parrish’s doctor called her and told her she had cancer. She says she felt shocked and angry, wondering why it had happened to her; she felt like she was too busy and didn’t have time to deal with it.

When she met with her oncologist, she found out she had triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive cancer. She decided to have a double mastectomy, and after healing from that, started chemotherapy, which she did for eight hours a day once every three weeks.

Her therapist helped her to put her diagnosis and questions in perspective.

“At one point, it’s like, ‘Christy, pull up your big-girl panties. This isn’t about me.’ It’s not about, ‘[I] did something wrong, we’re going to punish you,’ and God’s saying, ‘You’ve got to go through this.’ Maybe, it’s not about me. Maybe, it could be I need to spend more time with God. Maybe, he just wants [me] to sit on his lap and rely on him more. Or, the epiphany moment was, ‘It’s about somebody else. Maybe [I’m] going through this to help the next person get through it.’”

From the beginning of her diagnosis, Parrish began researching cancer because she wanted to know what to expect, utilizing Facebook groups to learn from people who had gone through similar experiences. When her oncologist told her she would need to start chemotherapy, her viewpoint was, “If it’s going to happen, how do I make the best of it?” Through her research, she found ways to lessen the side effects, such as wearing a cooling cap during infusion treatments to prevent hair loss, sitting with her fingers and toes in bags of ice to prevent neuropathy during infusion treatments and wearing dark-colored nail polish to help prevent her nails from falling off. Although she says she doesn’t know if any of these methods have been verified by scientific research, she figured it couldn’t hurt to do them, and so, she did.

Parrish continued working throughout her entire chemotherapy treatment. Her sister-in-law set up a CaringBridge website account for her, and writing about her experiences on the website became a type of therapy for her. Parrish says it was humbling to see the number of people who checked in on her via Facebook and texting. Many of her friends cleaned her home for her, brought her meals or came to sit with her during her chemotherapy treatments; as a single mom who worried about being able to do everything for her kids while also undergoing chemotherapy, she says these ways of showing care truly helped her through her journey.

She credits her parents, too, as being a main form of support; they took care of her while she stayed at their home for a week and a half after her bilateral mastectomy and while she was healing from a second surgery due to a hematoma infection. Her parents also took her to her chemotherapy treatments, where they sat with her.

“I’m a very independent person. I am not one to ask for help,” Parrish says. “But when you’re going through that, it was one of those things. You give it to God. I’m not in control. … You humble yourself. You have to [let people help you]. Because you can’t do it all by yourself.”

Parrish says maintaining a positive attitude and finding things to be thankful for, however small, is vital to surviving cancer. Keeping God at the center of it all is also a must, she says.

Through this experience, Parrish has been changed.

“There’s so many times you just raise your hands to God and say, ‘It’s yours.’ We are not in control,” she says. “I think I changed in such a way to where I’m more conscientious. I try to eat right, try to exercise, but more importantly — most importantly — my relationship with God. It really taught me, because I’ve always been a person [who has to] have everything right here, and I know what to do. So, it taught me that it’s not about me. I’m not in control.”