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67: Joy & Grief Coexist Together with Jen Myers Farmer (Part 1)
250 Plays3 years ago
If you know Jill Devine from her radio days, then you are bound to know Jen Myers Farmer. Jen and Jill worked closely together for almost ten years at the same radio station.
In 2016, Jen was diagnosed with breast cancer and her difficult cancer journey continues to this day. Jill invited Jen to come on the podcast to talk about the journey she has been on, along with her perspective on everyday life. The most important part of the conversation (in Jill’s opinion) was the reinforcement that ups and downs in relationships are normal and how powerful saying “I love you” can be.
You can read more about Jen’s story and make a contribution by clicking this link. Every dollar raised will support the Farmer family today and tomorrow. To offer them the blessing of one less thing to worry about as they navigate this next chapter. To pursue any future medical treatment available. To be together. To have fun. To, in the face of uncertainty, keep their resolve high and keep their lives moving ever forward.
Normal Goes A Long Way Website: https://www.normalgoesalongway.com/
Normal Goes A Long Way Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/normalgoesalongway/
Normal Goes A Long Way Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Normal-Goes-A-Long-Way-110089491250735
Normal Goes A Long Way is brought to you by Messiah St. Charles: https://messiahstcharles.org/
Two Kids and A Career: https://www.jilldevine.com/podcast
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Transcript
Jill's Skepticism and Podcast Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine Media production. Christianity has become known for judgy people, strange words, ancient stories, confusing rules, and a members-only mindset. This is why I stayed away from the church for so long, but it's not supposed to be that way. I'm Jill Devine, a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The Normal Goes Along Way podcast is your home for real conversations with real people using real language about how faith and real life intersect. Welcome to the conversation. Thanks for hitting play on this week's episode of Normal Goes Along Way. I'm Jill Devine.
Emotional Fallout and Personal Reflection
00:00:45
Speaker
And in the intro of this podcast, you hear me say that I am a former radio personality.
00:00:53
Speaker
And I talked about this a little bit in detail more than a little bit, but I did talk about this with Laura Fleetwood and Ryan Finler in episodes one, two, and three of this podcast. But if you miss those, long story short, I was a radio personality in the St. Louis market for a little over 20 years. And that career ended in December 2019.
00:01:23
Speaker
And when that ended, there was a lot of hurt. And I had to distance myself from most of the individuals at that radio station because it was too hard. It was too difficult. I distanced myself from people that I
00:01:42
Speaker
care and love about because I had to protect my feelings and sort things out. And I didn't want to say something that I didn't really mean, but you know how it happens when you're in a moment and emotions are running high.
Reconnection and Life Challenges
00:01:55
Speaker
And one of those individuals that I just put at arm length distance is Jen Myers. Now she is Jen Farmer, but
00:02:12
Speaker
for those that followed my radio career, familiar with Jen Myers. We worked at the same radio station for close to 10 years. She was there for about 20 years, but radio is a really crazy industry. And so we knew each other longer than that. And it's been a thing that has always bothered me is that we,
00:02:37
Speaker
didn't get to talk things out. And so I knew, even when I started my other podcast, Two Kids in a Career, I knew, I had written down on my list of guests that I wanted to talk to, Jen Myers, because at the time, and she's still, she's still fighting breast cancer, but I wanted to get her perspective because
00:03:04
Speaker
She was 41 when she was diagnosed. And so anyway, she was on my list and then everything happened and we had to take a break from one another. And over the last year or so we have, and I don't even want to say reconciled because I mean, I guess I can say that, but we have started to be in touch again.
00:03:33
Speaker
and really be able to talk to one another as friends, not coworkers. And so I invited her to be on my other podcast, Two Kids in a Career, and I just knew she has to be on this podcast too. You want to talk about someone who has strength and courage and such great advice and firm in their faith and
00:04:04
Speaker
Yes. So I am doing what I did with Brandon Janis, if you remember those episodes and having Jen be on two kids in a career and also normal goes a long way. So this is part one of our conversation.
00:04:27
Speaker
I don't even really know how to start. I'm being completely honest. Before- How do you normally start? Well, I would say welcome to this week's conversation. I can't wait to introduce you to my guest, but it just feels like you deserve more than that, Jen Myers. Stop. We had such- Farmer, now Jen Farmer. Oh, Jen Farmer slash Myers. Just like, yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:04:53
Speaker
We had just so much conversation before we recorded that wouldn't make any sense to the listeners so. You actually you might be right. Those of you who do know our story. We both were in radio together and.
00:05:13
Speaker
It, it's crazy. Like everything that's transpired. Um, I do know those that are listening that know us from our radio days are probably like, we do want the tea. Um, but we're not here to talk about that. I will say though, it's so good to feel how I'm feeling with you right now. And I'm gonna try to explain it like,
00:05:37
Speaker
With that, with the radio situation, let me back up with our relationship. So we met in, when did I start there? 2010, I think it was 2010. So we've known each other for 14 years now.
00:05:57
Speaker
We kind of knew each other before I started just because everyone in radio kind of knows each other. Yeah. And Jen and I are very similar. And so we both are go getters and competitive. And I think we both loved each other. Yes. But we both like.
00:06:19
Speaker
wanted things. I wouldn't even say it was a love-hate relationship because there was no hate ever. I think we were both Type A personalities. I think you were more organized than I was. I was like a disorganized Type A.
00:06:33
Speaker
Okay, maybe. But we were tasked with a lot of the same things. Yes, so we would like tag team on stuff. Yes. And if we missed a tag, that's where we would be like, what are you doing? And the thing with the radio that's so weird is that you see all you listen to the radio and you know all these people and
00:06:53
Speaker
You think they all work together, but we kind of work different hours and sort of see each other in passing. We're close, but we're not necessarily working side by side every day. Right. And so then, yeah, when you would be on the morning show and if there are things that I would need to do in the afternoon, but you were done. Right.
00:07:17
Speaker
And then I had little by like babies at the time. And so I was doing the morning show. Jill would be working on other stuff before she got on the air. Then I would get off the air, try and get all my stuff done, race home, get the kids, do all that stuff and kind of like check out from work. And it's just. I'm trying to check into work. Right. But it was never, I mean, I think maybe we had maybe one or two
00:07:48
Speaker
situations, other than that. Which, who doesn't it work? Right, and that's what it was, too, when you think about it, and I'm like, okay, this is normal. Right. This is completely normal, but... Our radio's not normal. No, it's not normal at all. And we're both people pleasers, so... Yes. So anyway, I feel so good that I'm just here with you in this conversation. I know. I miss having these daily conversations with you. And now, it sucks, too, because
00:08:17
Speaker
And now I'm with a, I have a six and a four year old and you're a season ahead
Jen's Cancer Battle: Diagnosis and Treatment
00:08:21
Speaker
of me. And I just wish we could have shared more of that together, which we can still now. But when you saw each other every day, it was different. Um, but it's just good to have that behind me. And those that are listening that know us know like Courtney
00:08:41
Speaker
is in our lives. There's no issue. So that's the tea we'll give you. There's no issue between any of us. We are all good. But I wanted you to come on because I wanted to talk to you about your perspective. I mean, first of all, would you have ever thought that I am working for a church
00:09:09
Speaker
and that you are not working in radio for health reasons. And I don't like those health reasons, but I wanted to talk perspective. So we're gonna back it up to, well, first of all, how old are the kids now?
00:09:26
Speaker
Thirteen and ten. It's crazy. Oh my gosh So when I started how so when you started fin my oldest was one. Oh, yeah Okay, cuz I he was born in 2009
00:09:42
Speaker
And then I was there. Yeah. For Nora. Uh-huh. Yeah. I remember that baby announcement. I loved that baby announcement with Nora. Did it say hello or hi? Yeah. Hi. Hi. I'm Nora. Okay. So 13 and 10 in 2016. That's when I had Lou and in 2016.
00:10:02
Speaker
you got your first cancer diagnosis. Yeah. Walk me through that a little bit. Right. Because, I mean, it was like, it went from didn't you like, you thought it was minor. Yeah. To not. Yeah. So it happened.
00:10:25
Speaker
May 12th, 2016, and I remember because it was Nora's half birthday, we joke around at our house that as a parent, be careful with starting a new tradition, because if you do something and you think it's cute one time, you're gonna have to do it for the rest of your life. So I cursed my son with a June birthday, which meant he couldn't have... Oh, the school party. The school party. The school birthday party.
00:10:53
Speaker
But the school made up for it and they did the half birthday party for all the summer kids. So still feeling guilty. The first year he was in school, I made him a half birthday cake. I baked a round little cake, cut it in half, frosted it and made it a two layer cake. He thought it was the coolest thing. Well, so then I have to do it like until the end of time.
00:11:20
Speaker
So May 12, 2016, I'm baking this half birthday cake for Nora. We're mixing it together. She's all excited. We put it in the oven. She goes outside to play. And I get the phone call that I have breast cancer. I had found a lump a few weeks before, went in, had a mammogram. They did a biopsy.
00:11:49
Speaker
They came back with the results and at first they thought it was stage one, grade three. So there are four stages of cancer, three grades of cancer, grade three being the most aggressive. I was 41 years old, no family history of breast cancer, no family history really of cancer. Everything changed. And then all of a sudden the little half birthday cake like wasn't so silly. You,
00:12:19
Speaker
ended up doing the double mastectomy because, well, wait, we didn't cover. You went in. Was the double mastectomy when you found out you had stage four or no? I found out I had stage three during the surgery, but I did the double mastectomy because I was like, I'm 41. I'm not messing around with this.
00:12:42
Speaker
Like, take everything. Yeah, just do it. Take it all. So I came out of the surgery and they realized that it was stage three and it spread to my lymph nodes and my skin. Okay. Which is rare. So you do all the things. Yeah.
00:12:58
Speaker
Do they give you a clean bill of health? I can't remember. Well, sort of. Like at the time I thought I went through chemo, then in the middle of the summer, there apparently weren't clean margins in the skin, which is a tough thing to find.
00:13:18
Speaker
Right along the incision line, I had a couple spots pop up. So then I did chemo and radiation at the same time, finished everything up by like December of 2016, rang the bell, had a CT scan. And the CT scan looked clear, but they don't say you're cancer free. They say no evidence of disease or any D. Okay, so no evidence of disease that they can see.
00:13:47
Speaker
And then you're kind of without a net. It's like, okay, like we're going to put you on this medicine. But for so long, I've been showing up to all these appointments and showing up like felt good. Yeah. It's like, okay, I'm actively doing something to fight this cancer. Yeah.
00:14:08
Speaker
And then when you're finished with all your treatments, it's like, okay, go back to your normal life or your new normal, as everybody calls it. So that lasted, let's see, for a year and a half. Yeah. Cause I was going to say 2018 I get pregnant again. I know. I'm sorry. No.
00:14:31
Speaker
I made your maternity leaves really difficult. I was like, Oh no, you can't get pregnant anymore. Jill. No, I know we could laugh about it, but 2018. Yeah. I got pregnant and then it's back. Yeah. So the cancer metastasized to my lungs. They found spots in my lungs.
00:14:56
Speaker
They found a couple of spots and I'm laughing because now I do crazy stuff. My doctor says she's going to wrap me in bubble wrap before every CT scan because I kind of go off the deep end. They see these spots in May of 2018.
00:15:10
Speaker
And they're like, it could be nothing, but you're going to come back for a CT scan in three months to see. So in the back of my ad, I'm like, it's nothing. It's nothing. It's nothing, but I've never been to Italy before. And that's on my list. So I booked a trip to Italy in like 60 days. I go in for the scan and the results, the spots have grown. So they assume that it's the breast cancer.
00:15:38
Speaker
And I'm like, they tell me I have to start treatment. And I said, well, that's funny. Cause I, um, I'm supposed to be in Italy at that point. And they said, Oh, you're going to Italy. Well, just start your treatment when you get back. So I did. And then for the next couple of years, I had like little spot treatments where they treat little individual spots on my lungs that would pop up.
00:16:07
Speaker
That's where I am. I'm kind of lost. So my radio career ended in December of 2019. Yeah. And I feel like not until the last year or so, I didn't really know what was happening. Right. And that's because of hurt and it wasn't anything that Jen did just so the listener know this is just,
00:16:35
Speaker
I needed a break. I needed a break from all kinds of stuff. And if there's one thing that I can say is take your break if you need to, but don't let it go too long. I let it go too long, but you're here. That's, that's what's, that's what matters. But I lost track of what happened from 2019 to present day a little bit. Yeah.
00:17:05
Speaker
Well, and I'm trying to remember all of it too. Cause it all kind of blurs together. Um, so going into January, 2020, obviously we know what happened in March of 2020. So was there anything in between those months that really developed or so March of 2020?
00:17:26
Speaker
Yeah, I still had spots on my lungs. So that was the thing. I was like, you see people ring bells and I've gotten to ring a lot of bells. And a lot of people are like, Oh, good, you're done. We're done. We don't have to worry about her anymore. But sometimes they would treat the spots that were large enough to treat. And then they would just watch the other ones that were stable and too small to treat.
00:17:55
Speaker
So in March of 2020, I talked with my doctor.
00:18:00
Speaker
with COVID, and they're like, this is in your lungs. We don't know. They still didn't know so much. So I just had to be really, really careful. And everything was good for a while. The issue with stage four cancer is that most drugs, after a while, the cancer cells outsmart the drugs and figure out a way around them.
00:18:30
Speaker
So since 2017, when I had no evidence of disease, each drug has lasted about an average of a year. They call it time to progression or TTP. And then after a while, the drug just stops working. And you switch to a new drug. And you switch to a new drug. And you hope that there are still tools in the toolbox left.
00:18:57
Speaker
So it was around this time last year that my latest medicine stopped working. I was I thought I kept telling myself it was allergies because I had this really bad cough.
00:19:11
Speaker
But then we did a scan and we realized it wasn't the tumors that gotten worse. I tried to get into a clinical trial, so I did a lung biopsy, but they didn't get enough tissue. So then I switched to a new drug that didn't really work for a couple months. It got worse. I went in one day and my doctor who is like so amazing and on top of everything did a scan sooner than she normally would.
00:19:41
Speaker
And she, I met with her on a Thursday and she's like, this drug is not working. You're starting chemo tomorrow.
00:19:51
Speaker
And I was like, can't ask for more than that. That's less than a 24-hour turnaround. Let's do it. I started chemo in May of last year. I was on that chemo until December. This is like way too much medical information for people. No, we need to know this. People are bored. Nope. You want to spill some tea?
00:20:12
Speaker
I know gossip is way more interesting than cancer, medical charts. So it stopped working, yeah, it stopped working towards the end of the year. And I was switching to a new medicine, going through all these tests, and then I woke up, should have started at the beginning talking about this.
00:20:34
Speaker
I woke up one morning and didn't have a voice. And so I went to the emergency room because they told me to. I was like, that's weird. It's just laryngitis. December. And, um, one of, so my cancer has spread.
00:20:50
Speaker
from my lungs, also in my lymph nodes. And one of the lymph nodes that's affected is pressing up against the nerve to the vocal cords. And so my vocal cords are partially paralyzed.
00:21:08
Speaker
There's, are you waiting for like the irony of it all? And so like, I should also say like in this time, I decided like May of last year is when I left my job to focus on my health. Can you imagine if I had been working and woke up one day and had no voice when my job is to be
00:21:33
Speaker
on the radio talking all day. So I've started a new drug and actually the drug that I'm on right now is the drug that I was, that was in the clinical trial last year that I was trying to get into. Um, it was given breakthrough status by the FDA. And as I was going through all these baseline tests to make sure everything looked okay before I started the drug.
00:22:00
Speaker
They had me do a test. Something looked a little suspicious. We did another test and I found out that... You take your time. We found out that the cancer had spread to my brain. But all of these tumors are still breast cancer. So... Wow!
00:22:30
Speaker
They know that because for a long time they were treating the lungs like it was breast cancer. And then I finally had a spot that was close to the side of my rib cage that they could biopsy. And so they did a few years ago and ran tests on it. They found that it was breast cancer. My breast cancer is estrogen and progesterone positive.
00:23:00
Speaker
And it's also, they found that it had changed a little bit, so it has a little HER2 expression in it. But they were like, this is what we assumed is that this is breast cancer, it's not lung cancer, it's breast cancer that's in the lungs. And breast cancer that's in the lymph nodes, and now breast cancer that's in the brain. That's so weird.
00:23:26
Speaker
When you have tumor cells, they circulate in your blood and so they can, that's how cancer spreads and becomes like a greater stage if it spreads to another part of your body.
Motivation and Resilience in Adversity
00:23:39
Speaker
Okay. So we have talked about the science. We've talked about the medical stuff because I know you're competitive because it takes one to know what, is that what's driving you? I mean, I feel defeated every time I see an update. So for me, it's easy because I know you and I'm like, she's just competitive. She's like,
00:24:03
Speaker
Nope. Nope. We're doing this. I remember very early on doing what you're not supposed to do. And that's Google anything about your cancer. Yeah. It's the number one thing I say to people stay off the internet. I don't care what time you wake up in the middle of the night, don't Google it. But I did. I Googled when I first found out I was stage three survival rates.
00:24:27
Speaker
And I don't remember what the five year survival rate was at the time, but it wasn't great. If it was say 25%, I was like, well, somebody has to be in that 25%. Why can't it be me? So I would say it's part competitive, but 110% of my kids. Can I ask about physical, like, pain? Are you in pain? No.
00:24:57
Speaker
Okay. No, I mean, I know it's a little more difficult to breathe. I mean, I can still like go on walks and stuff. I use an inhaler, but like I'm not in pain. Okay. The radiation. So I just finished whole brain radiation and that hurt radiation. You don't normally feel like over time you just get progressively more tired.
00:25:28
Speaker
at least for breast cancer. But this whole brain radiation was something else. I know I read your description of it and I thought, I know how debilitating it can be to have a migraine. Oh my gosh. And didn't you describe it like 5000 times worse? I just feel for people who have migraines and concussions and I came home one day.
00:25:52
Speaker
And I told the kids, I was like, you're on your own. When dad gets home, he'll feed you. There's food in the fridge. You need something beforehand. I'm going upstairs. I went upstairs in the bedroom, turned off all the lights, and just sat and like could not move my head. And I thought to myself, there are people that deal with this all the time. Like I don't even know.
00:26:18
Speaker
And then the chemo, does that make you ill? I mean, I've heard different things for different people, so... It depends on which chemo. The last chemo I was on, I was fine, I wasn't really sick. This one, I have once every three weeks, so it's a lot stronger. Okay. So the first few days I'm on steroids,
00:26:44
Speaker
Which means that I'm up at like one o'clock in the morning and I've done 17 loads of laundry before my whole family gets up. I'm super productive. Jelle, your type A personality. I'm not trying to push steroids on you, but just imagine what I could get done. Oh my gosh. Like Wonder Woman. So, um, I'm sick for like the first week, the second week, so, so, and then the third week I feel like a normal human being.
00:27:12
Speaker
and like get excited that I can clean my toilet and clean parts of my house. Because I have the energy too. Yeah. Okay. That's a perspective there. Right? One day I was like cleaning the bathroom and I was so excited. Okay.
00:27:31
Speaker
All right, that's going to conclude part one of the conversation between Jin and me. I encourage you to come back next week and listen to part two, which here's a little sneak preview of that.
00:27:49
Speaker
Sometimes seizing the day is you wake up early like I did this morning and my daughter came down early and she said she had a nightmare. We just sat and like snuggled on the couch and watched the sunrise. And that to me might be my favorite part of the day, but when, but before cancer, that's what I want to know. My brain might've been thinking of
00:28:14
Speaker
all the other things I had to do. And I wasn't present in that moment.