31 ONTARIO GRAIN FARMER JUNE /JULY 2024 ‘for sure,’ right away. She credits her dad as her biggest supporter. After her diagnosis in late January 2020, Banks had brain surgery on February 19. Then Covid hit. GETTING TREATED “I just wanted to get the treatment over with,” Banks says, but after moving everything, including all her radiation and chemotherapy information, to Ottawa, they closed the cancer clinic because of pandemic restrictions. “They held everything off,” she says, and finally was able to get in on June 1 for 30 rounds of radiation and six rounds of chemotherapy. She was also on steroids, which helped get her through the trials, but had brutal side effects like getting puffy and swollen. While her journey to and from treatments ‘wasn’t terrible’ at 45 minutes from her dad’s home, Banks says the lack of communication among the doctors was really frustrating. She didn’t even know what type of cancer she had (an astrocytoma versus an oligodendroglioma, which had previously been the diagnosis) until she read the discharge papers from the local hospital after having another seizure. “The Toronto doctors thought the Ottawa doctors would tell me, and the Ottawa doctors thought the Toronto doctors told me,” she says. She finally went into remission on March 14, 2021. About a year and a half later, Wood had a different experience. “Most of the time, they do surgery first, then chemotherapy, but I had the chemo first,” she says, adding that she had eight rounds of therapy with three different drugs combined in a dose every two weeks. After a couple of rounds of treatment before and after Christmas 2022, her hair was so matted that her girlfriends had to cut it all off. “They made me laugh through the process and allowed me time to deal with my emotions while showering it all out,” she says. The very next day, the friends flew out to participate in the Disney marathon. Wood completed a five-kilometre, ten-kilometre, half marathon, and full marathon on four successive days. “I told my oncologist that I was running this Disney marathon, and I could start chemo before or after, but either way, I was doing it,” she says. “Looking back on it, it gave me something to look forward to.” Wood is very athletic and enjoys swimming as well. Ironically, the surgeon she spent three months trying to see was swimming three lanes over from her the whole time. “She described the eight rounds of chemo as a 400-metre individual medley (100 metres each of backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, and freestyle), reminding me that the hardest part is after 300 metres, or after the sixth round of treatment — that really helped.” Running and swimming were very important to her throughout her entire journey, and she set a goal of running 600 kilometres during her chemotherapy. She also maintained a normal working schedule in her job with the OFA as much as possible. She finished chemotherapy on March 24, 2023, and had a double mastectomy in April. “I told them at the time that if you’re taking one side, take the other side — I’m not attached to them because if they’re trying to kill me, I’d rather be here than not be here.” She also started reconstruction surgery at the same time. “Everyone said, oh, it has to be a false positive because you’re so young,” says Wood, who was 33 at the time. KELSEY BANKS. PHOTOS SUPPLIED.
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