Making Sense of Medicine: Life after breast cancer
October 30, 2015 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Posted: Friday, October 30, 2015 3:00 am
The Daily News of Newburyport
If you are a woman, then it’s likely that you know more about breast cancer than I do. Still, as we near the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I offer some thoughts that may not be familiar. For example, you may not know that every year, there are some thousands of men who are diagnosed with breast cancer.
If you have survived breast cancer, which almost 99 percent of early stage patients do, then you have been through the gut-level fear that comes with the initial diagnosis, possibly through the last hope that it will go away without surgery, through the post-surgical feelings of having been assaulted and brutalized, and through the often-repeated nightmares of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. You have still the low-level fear that it could recur or could become ovarian, and in some way, you feel less a woman.
And while harboring a hope that there will be a return to normalcy, you know that there is no return, only the inevitable encounter with a strange new normal. What is life after breast cancer? It is beyond my experience to talk credibly about this, and so I relate a couple of stories of women who have lived into an even better future.
While different in detail, these and other stories have some commonality: Cancer is a wake-up call, a time to re-vision one’s life choices, a time of transformation and a time to explore new worlds. Some leave long-term stressful jobs or relationships, and others choose to pursue lives they’ve dreamed of for years but been too fearful and insecure to seek. In all cases, this brush with death seems to engender a kind of fearlessness in choosing newness. And, it helps to be loved.
One doctor put it this way to a woman who stayed in the hospital weeping and moaning for two weeks after her surgery: “You can do one of two things. You can sit here and cry and moan, or you can take back your life and be strong and positive.” These women chose the latter.
Debbie
Single mother Debbie Murphy, 39, had her second mastectomy (breast removal) a year and a half ago, and she is now nearing the end of her post-surgical treatment. Feeling low and unattractive and unloved, as is typical in her situation, she sought something, anything, to feel better about herself.
One day, she was inspired to enter Lorna Drew’s “Everyday Superwoman” competition, and she won. Never before considering posing in underwear, Murphy will be the face of Lorna Drew’s 2016 catalog of mastectomy lingerie. How did she screw up the courage to do this?
Her 3-year-old son “inspired me to enter the competition because when I had to shave my hair, he stroked my head and said, ‘You’re beautiful,’” she told Wales Online.
“Hearing your child say you are beautiful with a bald head and no breasts has reinforced that our bodies do not define us as people,” she said. “I wanted to feel feminine and be able to wear clothes that show my figure. I wanted to be able to wear a young person’s matching underwear set.”
Rebecca
At 35, a perfectionist with a fear of flying, Rebecca Loncraine had finished her doctorate in English literature, as well as writing a biography of L. Frank Baum, author of “The Wizard of Oz.” A settled, organized life was on its way for her.
Then the lumps appeared, and she underwent a grueling year of treatment — chemotherapy, surgery, radiation and CT scans that showed no spread of the breast cancer. She wasn’t sure she could write again, as her illness had rendered her almost speechless: “For the past year, I’d been unable to talk about what was happening, I couldn’t even cry sometimes,” she told The Telegraph in the U.K. “I had no idea what to do next.”
What happened next was a chance walk past the Black Mountains Gliding Club in Wales.
“I needed something new, something big and intense,” she said. “I wanted to live boldly, as it might not be for very long.”
What she did was take her first glider-flying lesson, which was so freeing, so exhilarating that she went back for more lessons.
Now 38, Loncraine lives in a converted chapel nestled in the Black Mountains. In the morning, she looks out to see if there’s enough blue sky or cotton-wool cumulus clouds. If so, she’ll spend the day in joy, soaring over the Brecon Beacons in a glider.
If the weather’s not so good, she’ll spend the day inside working on her book about flying or an upcoming talk.
An artistic approach
Looks may not be everything, but for women with reconstructed breasts, it can mean a lot. The one thing that breast reconstruction has never been good at is restoring the natural look of the nipple and areola, the colored area around the nipple. Vinnie Myers is changing that.
Myers is a tattoo artist with offices in Finksburg, Maryland, and New Orleans, Louisiana, who is internationally known for his ability to ink realistic designs. He is now also a legend in breast cancer circles for what has become his specialty: inking areolas and nipples so realistic that they seem like the real thing.
Surviving survivorship
Oncologist and breast cancer survivor Dr. Elizabeth Lynn Meyering advises her patients this way: Stay active with physical exercise, eat healthy — eliminate processed and sugary foods — and sleep naturally.
And, as important, reinvent yourself, have a goal, do things you’ve always dreamed of doing.
Finally, she reminds her patients that they are not defined by their cancer. They are the same people they were before, but with a chance to start a new chapter of their lives.
What Meyering doesn’t mention is that survivors who meet regularly with a support group are more likely to have a successful life after breast cancer.
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Bob Keller maintains a holistic practice in Newburyport. He offers medical massage therapy for pain relief and advice on muscular balance and diet, as well as psychological counseling, dream work and spiritual direction. He can be reached at 978-465-5111 or bob@myokineast.com.
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Friday, October 30, 2015 3:00 am.
