Ready to Share

And learning how to ask.

… now I’m ready to remove the wig and share this with you.

I wasn’t ready at all!

I would have much preferred to keep pretending, but by this point (*Spoiler Alert* - if the title hasn’t left enough of a clue!), I was only days away from double mastectomy surgery with no reconstruction, having already undergone neoadjuvant chemotherapy and with high-dose radiation still up ahead. By this time it was my life’s reality, I have always cherished authenticity and within days all was about to become visually obvious and unavoidable.

Also, by this time, I was used to navigating the rich variety of people’s reactions. If receiving a cancer diagnosis isn’t hard enough, then comes the sharing of your news. 

I have breast cancer.

Your life has come crashing down, smashed to the floor in that doctor’s room like a glass vase of flowers, now a seeping, ruined mess at your feet. You quickly have to decide who to hand the shards of glass to. Who you will ask to hold out their upturned palm for you to place one sharp-edged piece there, entrusting them to not cut themselves or bleed out on your behalf. Again, the antithesis of “It’s a baby girl!”. 

I found this excruciatingly hard. I needed emotional support, but I needed to carry on in a way that felt like keeping everything together. Born and raised in Britain and now living in British Columbia (not so very far from the tree) meant that a stiff upper lip approach was mostly all I knew and the stoic reaction from my parents and husband affirmed that choice. I could barely handle my own emotional reaction, let alone face those of others. 

However, there were others in my circle who well understood my need for tears, my need to express the fear and anger. Those who were healthy enough to meet their own emotional needs could hold space for me to vent and to not worry that I might be “losing my sh*t”. Many of them told me that “losing it” was a healthy response. That “holding on tight” might be appropriate for a fast speedboat ride, but that dropping all decorum and letting myself feel was a healthy response to this threat to life as I knew it. And it possibly held the secret to what would also save me.

Then, inevitably, there were those who desperately wanted to help by giving me their advice. That didn’t feel like support to me. What that did was amp-up my “Desperately Seeking Solution” reliance on another’s authority; the very trauma I was trying to heal from.

I have researched all manner of expert opinion and I’m overwhelmed with treatment options, so please, no recommendations of boiled sock juice and tumour-vanishing miracles - I can’t take any more advice. It’s time to trust MY choices.

The best support I heard in that domain was “Trust yourself to know. Listen to all the expert advice and listen with your whole being. You will know what route to take when the time comes.” It sounded like science-fiction to me, but the first lessons in trusting my ‘knowing’ came from recognizing the stress and nausea that unsolicited stories added to my sleepless nights, and I slowly learned to say ‘Thank you, but no thank you’. I started to put a healthy boundary around me and the well-meaning, but self-serving advice.

I understood that I was the bringer of news that reminds us all that life is NOT in our control, that even keeping ourselves healthy - doing all the “right things” - isn’t the security we think it is. And that was clearly frightening to some and they, like me, wanted to provide the perfect solution. 

I learned that everyone, bless them, will react in ways according to their own beliefs and understanding, their own experience, their own lives. In ways that they need. 

They might have seen something work successfully for a person close to them and so urged me to “Juice like my father”, “Go to a Mexican Treatment Centre like my friend”, “Just listen to the doctors and do what they say like my mother”, “Take Chaga mushrooms like this guy I heard about”, “Rub Frankincense on your boobs like this woman I heard of who cured herself completely!”  I could understand it, but it was an unwelcome barrage and I was already exhausted from the battering that cancer was giving me. 

So this is why, by the time I made this more public reveal, I was able to ask for what I wanted and felt I needed. Good movies, music and comedies. Good food for me and my family. Company and companionship. And I was met with so much more than I could ever possibly have known to ask for!

I would love your support though. Let me know you’re thinking of me, hearing my fears and rage; still seeing me as your friend under the cancer cloak I am currently wearing.

My neighbour paid her cleaner to come and scrub my bathrooms during chemo. My best-friend choreographed food provision via a group of friends who sent weekly homemade food, from dinners to lunch snacks for my kids. Women I barely knew came to my door with lasagnes, salads and cookies. Women I’ve loved for decades took transatlantic flights to come to my side. There is the unforgettable soup that a friend prepared from scratch right there in my kitchen, me seated at my own table not lifting a finger, while she recounted how life was still turning its tricks out there without me! I was driven to appointments, my hand was held during chemo, flowers were sent after surgery, and SO many heartfelt conversations about life, death and everything in between. I got more than I even knew I needed, including a list of Netflix comedies that I still haven’t finished watching! I learned about community in ways that even raising children had not yet taught me.

And my gratitude increased alongside the terror, and my personal insight grew.

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