Guilt in Breast Cancer

Guilt in Breast Cancer

So, here are some things that might have caused my breast cancer:

• Being a woman—guilty
• Getting older—guilty
• Genetic inheritance—not guilty
• Periods before the age of twelve—guilty
• Overweight before menopause—guilty
• First child after the age of thirty—guilty
• Current or recent use of birth control pills—guilty
• Large breasts—not guilty
• Dense breasts—not guilty
• Not breast-feeding—partially guilty (breast-fed for only three months)
• Not exercising regularly—guilty
• Not having lots of children—guilty
• Excessive alcohol use—not guilty

You get the point. You have been diagnosed with a horrible, possibly deadly, disease.
You will go through a wretched regimen of treatment and your body will be (temporarily)
wrecked as you do. The embodiment of your femininity, the breast, is the treacherous
villain in this drama, and you are the one who feels guilty. How can this be?

Well, this must have been my fault, right? Looking at that list, I tend to focus on the
things that were in my control—weight, birth control pills, breast feeding, exercise,
childbearing. Of course I must have done something wrong to cause this, and all I can feel
is guilty. With the passage of time you realize this guilt is almost irrational. But that is not
what it feels like in the moment. I think that is because not only do you feel guilty that you
have this disease you might have been able to prevent (not true, but…) but also you start to
feel guilty because of what this is doing to the people around you.

You feel guilty that your life at home (which you might have been holding together with
duct tape and chewing gum, if truth be told) is going to be severely disrupted by the fact
that you have this disease. Your family has to adjust to a new you, a sometimes needy you,
a you that isn’t really you but a vessel for this disease at this moment.

You feel guilty about how this might disrupt things for people around you outside your
family. For me it was the strain put on my colleagues who were picking up my slack. They
couldn’t have been more supportive and generous and loving, but that never stopped me
from feeling guilty.

You also feel guilty when you hear someone else’s story that is worse than yours and so
maybe you shouldn’t be feeling so bad about what you are going through. And, in case you
thought there was nothing that could compound your feelings of guilt, there is. That guilt
feels worse because everyone tells you how lucky you are compared with X. There is
probably nothing worse than someone who doesn’t have cancer telling you how lucky you
are. Luck is when you win the lottery (see “O Is for Odds”), not when you get breast
cancer.

There is no hierarchy of cancer by which you must abide, where you have to be upbeat
and positive because there is someone who has a worse breast cancer than you. That logic
might make sense in some detached, objective way, though in fact it is not true. You, the
breast cancer patient, are neither detached nor objective. You are intimately attached to this
disease, and everything about it is subjective. So, permission granted to feel terrible about
what you are going through and to not feel guilty in the slightest about any of it, okay?

Here are the facts about breast cancer. It is an insidious, wretched disease, whose
treatment can be worse than the disease itself. You did nothing wrong; you are not being
punished for something you might have done in your current life, or your past lives for that
matter. The truth is we don’t really know what causes breast cancer. Ultimately there is
one thing we do know: if you have breast cancer, you have some rogue cells that decided
to do their own thing and play havoc with your body. And that is nothing to feel guilty about.