Mother’s Day Tribute: Tara Beats Cancer

Everything in life changes when you become a parent … Your life won’t be about you anymore. You’ll see. (Anne Lang as told by Tara Shuman in “Tara Beats Cancer,” October 2012)

In early August of last year, Anne Lang Talbot of Canton had her world turned upside-down with the news that her firstborn child, Tara, had an invasive form of breast cancer.

Tara Shuman and her mom, Anne

An executive at a local hospital, Anne was in Nashville on a business trip when she received the call, and she rushed home as soon as she could, taking the next flight to Boston to be with her daughter and to assure her that, somehow, everything would be okay.

Of course, Anne had no way of knowing this at the time. But when she arrived home later that evening to a shell-shocked family, she did her best to stay strong, as moms tend to do. As Tara recounted in her now popular “Tara Beats Cancer” blog, “She cried a bit, hugged me tight, made a few jokes, then got down to business.”

“Within hours,” Tara continued, “she had talked to anyone and everyone that could be a resource for us, and perhaps in record time, we were hooked into the system at Dana Farber and she had made friends with key people there. This is one lady you want in your corner, and I’ve been blessed to have her in mine for 32 years.”

But deep inside Anne was surely devastated — and afraid, just knowing what her daughter, herself a young mother, would have to endure over the coming months and years.

“I don’t think there’s anything tougher than watching your child go through this, dealing with a life-threatening disease,” acknowledged Anne in a recent interview. “You just wish with all of your heart that somehow it could be avoided.”

On countless occasions over the last few months she has questioned why it had to be Tara and not her. “I think you sort of ask that question all the time,” she said.

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By now, it seems that most people in Canton are familiar with Tara’s story, either through her blog or through a personal connection with Tara or her husband Brian, the current CHS boys’ ice hockey coach.

A 1998 Canton High graduate and former CHS social studies teacher, Tara had been thriving in both her personal and professional lives — with two beautiful children and a successful career as a health care attorney — when the discovery of a lump in her breast prompted her to visit her primary care doctor in the middle of last summer. Soon, a checkup became an ultrasound, which turned into a biopsy, which resulted in a terrifying diagnosis of “triple positive” breast cancer — the kind that grows in response to hormones such as estrogen and a certain protein called HER2.

The news was almost too much for her to bear, especially for someone like Tara who had taken care of her body, never smoked, and had no family history of the disease. Fortunately, she had a strong support system that included both of her siblings, Rachel and Sean, her father, John, and several other family members, close friends and colleagues.

And the two constants through it all, she said, the ones who have remained by her side at all of the doctor’s appointments and hospital stays, are her husband and her mom. Since August Tara has written extensively about both, and usually it is with a tone of reverence and amazement for all of the support they have shown her.

“This just has to be so hard for my mom and I sometimes forget it because it’s hard for me,” said Tara. “Sometimes I don’t think enough about what it must be like for her and for Brian.”

“Just watching what my mother’s had to watch, it’s probably been harder for her, truly, than it has been for me,” she added. “She’s just done more than I could ever explain.”

Tara marveled at how her mother has been able to make it to all of her medical appointments — from her double mastectomy surgery to her subsequent chemotherapy infusions — while continuing to work full time. She was there when Tara went into anaphylactic shock due to an allergic reaction with a chemo drug, and she was there when Tara had her hair cut short at Salon Monique in Canton.

“She answered the phone when the doctor called to confirm the biopsy results that we already knew, because I didn’t want to have those words in my memory,” wrote Tara in a post entitled “My Mom.” “She lined up all of the doctor’s appointments that I was too devastated to admit even needed to be made … But most importantly, a few nights ago, when I completely broke down at the dinner table, she let me cry on her shoulder, telling me I deserve that time to be upset, angry, and scared.”

Asked about her role in Tara’s treatment and recovery, Anne said she does her best to balance her desire to nurture with Tara’s need for space and rest, and she considers it an “absolute privilege” that her adult daughter wants her to be there for her.

At the same time, Anne understands that Tara has had to “go through it alone” emotionally and thinks she has been “incredibly courageous,” adding that it is “sheer torture, a living hell, to watch your child go through something like that.”

She said it has been similarly tough on Tara’s father. “In many ways, it has probably been even harder for him to see his daughter go through this,” Anne said. “He’s the dad. From the depths of his being he wants to be the one that fixes this.”

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As it stands, three days before Mother’s Day in 2013, Tara is technically cancer-free and finished with her chemotherapy, although she will take the drug tamoxifen and will have to be monitored closely for the next five to ten years.

She described the past few months as the “highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows,” and she acknowledged that it has been difficult to get back to a normal, “post-cancer” routine.

“Some people come up to me and say, ‘Congratulations, you’re done,” noted Tara. “But the reality is that I’m never done.”

The hardest part of all, she said, is knowing that the cancer could one day come back, and she is determined to be there for her kids, Teddy, now 5, and Annabel, now 2, well into their adult years.

As she wrote in one of her blog posts about a lesson learned from her own mom, “Having kids has made me an exponentially better person. A less selfish person. A more loving person. With more perspective, more patience, more energy, more enthusiasm, more honesty, and more empathy.”

And this Mother’s Day, knowing what she now knows and grateful for all of the gifts that she has been fortunate to receive, Tara will hug both of her kids and her husband a little tighter, while saving a special one for the best teacher that she’s ever had — her mom.

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Posted by Jay Turner on May 9 2013. Filed under Featured Content. Both comments and pings are currently closed.