Accepting That You Are Changed by Cancer

I usually write about my daughter’s cancer experience after being diagnosed at 27 with breast cancer, but today I’m going to share a story about a friend of mine who was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer at 43 as her initial diagnosis, meaning the cancer had already spread from her breast.

The original location when it metastasized was her liver, and her first-line treatment took her to the two-year mark before it metastasized to her upper spine. Since then, she has gone through months of pain, a spinal surgery, and is now undergoing targeted radiation treatment to try to kill any remaining cancer cells hiding in the bones of her neck. To deliver the radiation, she wears a fitted mask that is attached to the treatment table, pinning her in place.

My friend is one tough cookie and prides herself on her ability to push through discomfort on her own. She has learned all the techniques like breathing and visualization, and they have gotten her through many challenging situations in her life, including all the cancer treatments she has encountered so far. But nothing was working this time because…

She is claustrophobic.

We don’t live in the same city, so our communication is mostly through following each other on social media and through messages. When she was approaching her third treatment, I saw her posts about how she worked through the first one, but the second one she had a panic attack, and the treatment team had to let her out of the mask so she could recover, though she got back under it again. She was dreading the next three treatments and didn’t know how she would get through them.

That’s when I reached out and told her the same thing I told Adrienne: you don’t have to feel this way. It’s not that the coping mechanisms you used successfully in the past aren’t working because you’re somehow messing it up this time. It’s because cancer is bigger than anything else you’ve faced before.

For her whole life, my friend’s internal dialogue was either “You can do this” or “Suck it up, princess.” No mountain she couldn’t climb, no river she couldn’t cross. Every time she looked in the mirror, she saw strength and perseverance in the face of all obstacles, and so the pale, overwhelmed reflection she saw after that second treatment was like a stranger looking back at her.

It's one of those parts of cancer that they don't talk about a lot—how you must shift so much of who you think you are, do things you never thought you'd do, and taking medication for anxiety was one of them for my friend. Her personal toughness had moved over on the continuum, and while the skills that her pre-cancer self had used to cope were still there, they weren’t enough to manage what she is facing now, so she asked for something to help keep her calm for the third treatment.

True to form, she took the smallest dose possible, and when they called her name, the panic attack came instantly. She was weeping and trembling, unable to get out of her chair. Thankfully, the staff had seen this before and told her there was a stronger medication they could give her that they offered many cancer patients in her situation, and things were bad enough that she took it.

And she took it for the fourth and fifth treatments as well.

I am very grateful that my friend encountered such compassion from her treatment team, and she has another powerful tool in her kit going forward because with a stage 4 metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, hers is a never-ending story. She is still grieving what she sees as a loss, but I can tell that she is moving very quickly toward accepting that just because she has a breaking point, that doesn’t make her less of a person. This experience has made it easier to take the pain medication she’s been given so she can at minimum be comfortable, and it has made it easier to step through the discomfort of shifting her self-image and embracing her own humanity.

As caregivers, it’s important for us to understand that resistance to some things we see as no-brainers in the circumstances may be about much more than what we perceive in the moment. When a loved one is in pain or panicking, it’s easy to encourage them to take the medication, but for the cancer patient it may feel like surrendering, and that’s a much bigger pill to swallow when you feel like cancer has taken so much from you already. If we can hold on long enough for them to move through it, they’ll more than likely get there eventually, and we will have avoided painful confrontation along the way by choosing not to push.

And for the other mama bears like me out there, I know that’s a huge pill to swallow because the person we see in the mirror is the protector, but we must shift too, and I understand how hard that can be.

Because we are, after all, only human.

This piece reflects the author’s personal experience and perspective. For medical advice, please consult your health care provider.

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