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getting to the other side of a cervical cancer diagnosis
after corinne schelle's cervical cancer diagnosis, she and her family moved out of a busy western canadian city to start a healthier life.
feb 13 2020
3 minute read
corinne schelle with her husband adam.
adam and kev photography
corinne schelle’s life took a sharp turn when she was 38 years old. around the time her son turned six months old, she started experiencing bleeding. when her family doctor chalked it up to abnormal menstrual cycles after giving birth to her son, she persisted.
what turned out to be a tumour quickly transformed the next few weeks of schelle’s life into a sudden onslaught of shocks: she was diagnosed with cervical cancer related to hpv, the latter diagnosis she had known about for years. and within weeks of her cancer diagnosis, she had to undergo a radical hysterectomy, which pushed her and her husband to ask themselves tough questions about whether or not they wanted more children and if so, should they harvest her eggs. but the biggest question was whether or not she was going to be around to be that child’s mom.
as an event planner, she was used to knowing what was going to happen next — but not knowing what the next few months held for her life was unsettling.
“a lot of the hardest parts of dealing with a cancer diagnosis is the waiting,” she says . “waiting to know more, waiting to know what the treatment is, waiting for an appointment to talk to the doctor. chemo and radiation was a drag, but waiting was the hardest part.”
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after the surgery, schelle faced six months of treatment, including, 25 rounds of radiation, four rounds of a low-dose chemotherapy to boost the radiation’s effectiveness, and another three rounds of full chemotherapy. once she received the all-clear, she decided there had be a silver lining to everything that she had gone through.
corinne schelle (right) with her son, crosby (centre) and husband adam (left), who shaved his hair in solidarity after lost her hair.
adam and kev photography
schelle and her husband, adam, decided they would do as much as they could to live a cleaner lifestyle to ensure their son wouldn’t go through any sort of similar ordeal. they started exercising, sleeping better, reducing stress, and eating cleaner foods so they could live as healthy a life as possible. and to reduce stress, they left their home in vancouver — canada’s most expensive city — and moved to kamloops, a mountainous town in the interior of british columbia.
“it was important for us to raise our son in a place we could afford and have him grow up with a house, a backyard and access to nature,” she says. “it’s been a big shift. we’ll go back to the city for good sushi and restaurants, but we couldn’t be happier up here.”
the move got a hundred times better when schelle’s brother, his wife and five children uprooted their lives in ontario and also moved to kamloops. soon after, her parents also relocated to b.c.
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“it’s been one great thing after another following six months of hell,” she says, calling the fact that her son has five cousins living so close ‘magical.’ “i think it was an eye-opener—not only for my husband and son—but also for my extended family that life is short and you need to be with the people you love.”
cancer recovery is about more than treatment
one of the biggest surprises she received during treatment came from her best friend, who had contacted schelle’s friends as well as her colleagues in the wedding planning industry to set up a meal train as she underwent chemotherapy and radiation.
“for three months, every single evening somebody brought us a meal,” she says. “some were people i barely knew. it was so touching that somebody would take time out of their day to prepare a healthy meal for us.”
corinne, adam, and crosby in front of their home in kamloops, b.c.
adam and kev photography
now 41, schelle looks back and says she’s especially thankful for inspirehealth , a non-profit supportive cancer care organization that provided her with a physician, a counsellor, a nutritionist, and a kinesiologist — all for free.
one of the most memorable encounters she had at inspirehealth was with a nutritionist there whose child was born only one week apart from schelle’s son, crosby. understanding schelle’s love of breastfeeding and her distress over having to give it up, they focused on how to satisfy her son’s dietary needs.
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today, schelle says strangers reach out over social media to say that she inspired them to get a pap test, even if they had been scared to get one for as many as seven years. others tell her they were once hesitant to get their children vaccinated for hpv, but now have.
“i think if you can prevent what i went through,” she says, “then, why wouldn’t you vaccinate?”
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