Search This Blog

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Afraid of Breast Cancer?

BUST FREE WITH...
BUSTING LOOSE: CANCER SURVIVORS
TELL YOU WHAT DOCTORS WON'T

Available from Amazon and your local bookstores

Special offer for the holidays at http://www.cherylswanson.net/


EXCERPT

Why It’s So Good to be Bad

No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

She smiled, or I never would have met her.

She wasn’t smiling at me; she was smiling at her own wit in the pages of an article she was editing. The woman had great cheekbones and nice features ruled by huge blue eyes. In spite of what chemotherapy had done to her appearance, she looked younger than forty-two.

I said hello and knelt to pet the golden Labrador retriever dozing at her feet. I’d just finished a follow-up appointment and my rumbling stomach had sent me to a San Francisco dockside café. The tables were crowded with investment bankers and tech-heads discussing how to make a million bucks that afternoon. There were also a few patients undergoing cancer treatment at the nearby hospital—including Julia, who I soon found out was also a writer.

I didn’t plan to sit with Julia, partly because I am shy and partly because she was sitting in direct sunlight. Like me, her head wasn’t covered and I could almost smell the UV rays sizzling off her bald skull.

“Chemo is a bitch, isn’t it,” she said casually, as I stroked the Lab’s velvety head.

I’m not sitting with you, I thought. I’ll find a table in the shade.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” She smiled a private smile.

“What feels good?” As if magnetized, my fingers kept rumpling the Lab’s soft fur.

Her smile got broader. “Hair.”

The Lab’s name was Riddles. Riddles’ owner snapped shut her writing notebook and asked me to join her. And I did, although you are never supposed to sit in the sun, no matter how good it feels, not in the middle of chemotherapy. Not only does chemotherapy treatment make the skin photo-sensitive, but if you’ve recently lost your hair, you’re exposing skin that hasn’t seen the light of day since you were a baby. And I had just lost my long hair—most of it literally blowing off my skull one day when I went outside, and the rest of it shaved off two days later.

But this was Julia and Julia did that to people. When you were with Julia, the rules didn’t apply. So I sat down with her and ordered pastrami on rye. We chatted about my novel and her series of articles on her father, who had been a southern poet of some note.

I ran into Julia several times after that. It wasn’t long before I found out that she was in a marriage that was more toxic than any chemotherapy. Her husband had reacted to her cancer by telling her that her she looked like a freak and her appearance disgusted him. When she burst into tears, he told her she might as well get it over with and die.

“No matter what, I’m going to live long enough to divorce that bastard,” she told me. “He’s been cheating on me because he thinks I’m helpless, going through chemotherapy. He’ll change his mind when my lawyer gets done with him.”

Starting divorce proceedings in the midst of chemotherapy is hardly an action a therapist would recommend. But I couldn’t help but notice that Julia found it liberating. She was the type of person who was not afraid to go into the darkness alone.

One thing I learned from during my treatment is that cancer makes good marriages better and bad marriages worse. I also learned there are lots of ways women empower themselves to get through the ordeal of cancer treatment. Humor works and so does faith and optimism.

So does consulting the dark side of ourselves.

I don’t mean turning into an avant-garde version of a character in Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. I don’t mean becoming a madwoman, getting into a fistfight with a saleslady, or staring down at the bottom of a whisky glass with cigarette smoke swirling. I don’t mean overeating for months, or dumping our work on someone else.

I mean not being afraid to walk away from someone who is brutal to us—even if that someone is our spouse. I mean valuing our own dignity and insisting that others not treat us cruelly.

Let’s be honest. Implicit in society’s definition of us as a “breast cancer victim” is the concept that we can be easily controlled. Breast cancer patients are sick, weak, vulnerable, and powerless—so the world thinks. At the hospital we’re expected to be passive and dependent “good patients,” who don’t rock the boat.

Dealing with the “cancer patient” stereotype can subvert a survivor’s attempt to conquer their illness. It can also give a woman who is struggling to get through a devastating illness a feeling of relentless, inevitable doom. Learning to release anger on the other hand can have great rehabilitation benefits. Righteous anger in the midst of cancer brings a great, wild joy at being alive.

What Julia taught me was that retaining our life in the midst of a crisis requires the ability to be dark, rebellious and full of “bad thoughts.” We have to give free rein to our self-protective instincts—no matter where they lead us. And even if those instincts, frankly, terrify us.

Julia’s husband refused to end his affair and he continued to abuse her. It took her almost two years, but Julia finally divorced him. Her chemotherapy infusions were useful to her, not just in curing her disease, but on an emotional level. Toxic material siphoned into her veins became toxic anger she funneled into liberating herself.

Julia’s marriage and cancer treatment ended about the same time and she’s made a good recovery from both. These days, she’s out there taking risks, enjoying being a “bad girl,” not sitting around the house ironing her husband’s shirts so he can look good when he sneaks around with other women.

“You can’t have everything,” she told me recently, with a wicked laugh. “But you can try. Oh, you can try.” And so Julia tries. And so should we all.

Julia is the wild woman of breast cancer and her numbers are legion. Like Julia, these women have something important and simple to teach us. Allow access to all parts of yourself—all the animals within, from lioness to lamb. Be all you need to be to survive. Be good, because that makes you happy. Be strong, because you life is just beginning, not ending. And don’t be afraid of your dark side. Because sometimes, it’s oh so good to be bad.