You in Breast Cancer survivors

You in Breast Cancer survivors

I don’t think I am a particularly selfish person. I have a husband and two children, so I
consider three other people in my life every single day. Growing up in a house with three
siblings meant that even on the days when I might have wanted things to be about me, they
weren’t. I work in a business where absolutely nothing gets done without the collaboration
of so many others. This has made me conscious of people around me and able to interact
in myriad situations with myriad individuals.

When you are diagnosed with breast cancer, however, it is all about you. This is the
most rare of situations when you have permission to be selfish and self-centered and maybe
even a bit demanding. This doesn’t mean you should turn into a bitch. It means you should
surrender to the fact that you have this terrible diagnosis and you really need to focus on
you and what you need. What you are feeling at any given moment is the most important
thing during this period. Give yourself permission to get comfortable with that.

A focus on you can take many forms. For your family, your disease and treatment
become the “thing,” the dominant force in your family’s life. For our family this meant a
calendar chockablock with appointments and tests for me, many of which my husband had
to be a part of, sometimes because I needed someone to bring me home, sometimes to be
the second set of ears, listening in on every conversation with every medical professional
(see “N Is for Notebook”). So his focus had to be on me. It meant my siblings and my
sister-in-law and my father all came from overseas just for me. Not as they had so many
times before, to see my growing children, or to take a vacation from work and see the
cherry blossoms in D.C., but to see me and help me with whatever I needed.

There were more mundane ways in which my focus on myself was felt by all. Beware
my wrath if you finished up the only ice cream flavor that I could eat. Okay, maybe I was
a bitch about that. If I didn’t want to have people drop by, I could just say no without a
sense of guilt or obligation or impropriety or anything else. If I wanted to spend the
afternoon in bed crying, well, that was okay too.

My recommendation to you is to embrace you, which is harder than it sounds. At many
points in your life, perhaps in a moment of quiet reflection, you might have admitted to
yourself that what you wanted to say was “to heck” with everyone else, here is what I
want to do. Breast cancer gives you the perfect excuse to do this, although going through
with it will make you feel terrible. Terrible because you feel that this disease is now a
burden to so many other people and you feel guilty about it (see “G Is for Guilt”). You
might feel a little timid about being demanding. Don’t. It is perfectly appropriate to have
your world turn its direction toward you. It is a useful advantage of carrying the cancer
card—use it to its utmost benefit.