Tag Archives: lumpectomy

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight

Telling people about your cancer (TMI) – A Loving Fight

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“Save your energy and emotions and let me be your voice.  People can be frustrating, but they mean well.”

My wife and I need to develop a communication plan. First she is getting hit with lots of questions from all the people she has told and secondly,  she is getting inundated with those three major questions which are slightly uncomfortable: 1) Are you going to have a mastectomy or lumpectomy?  2) Are you going to get reconstruction.  3) What size do you think you’ll get?

Hey people?  She’s got cancer?  How about waiting to see?  I know we all have a curiosity factor, but come on!  My wife has been pretty good about this, but our communication strategy has broken down and she doesn’t know how to stop it.  So from now on she is just going to tell people that she is waiting to see what the doctor says.  Well that is partly our fault.  We don’t need to tell everyone.  We don’t want pity.  We want something else.  Well what is that?

Really, the key to all of this is to create a vision. 

We’ve broken it down to: 1) Immediate Family, 2) related family, 3) close friends, 4) School and work social circles, and 5) casual friends.  Only 1, 2, and 3 we are telling about the surgery for sure.  Only #1 needs to know the details of scope and such.

As I mentioned, we have a vision and my wife have discovered this vision as we’ve met people that have had cancer and are helping us.  Every time we find someone has had cancer, we are shocked.  We say, “Wow, you look great!  We never knew!  When did you have it?”  Every time we do that there is a joy in their face!  They know that we are genuinely surprised and are happy that they are healthy and doing well.  It is so much better than the sorrowful look of having to tell people you have cancer as they look for away to ask if they can help and then clumsily ask too many questions.

So we are working on our cancer epitaph.  What do we want people to say to us when we kick this thing.  We want high 5’s , wows, and congratulations.  That is what we want and are going to strive for.  We are only telling people who can help us and that need to know.  No need for sorrow or pity. 

Now be sure to get back to me here on this.  I’m going to come back to this section in November and hopefully we’ll be getting those pats on the back.  They are so much better.

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight

Mood Swings, MRI Results – Fighting Breast Cancer

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“It’s time to focus not only on the opportunity we have, but how we can improve.  It’s also a time to communicate openly”.

Every day brings new results, new problems, new hope, etc.  Every day we run into someone else we tell about the cancer and they offer their help.  It is also a time to spot the problems in your relationship.  The pychological impact of living with cancer is now starting to really creep into our relationship.

I hate myself sometimes.  How can I argue with my wife who is struggling with cancer and is about to face a key life event?  I want so much for her to be happy, but obviously this cancer is creating tension that strains the fabric of your relationship.  We have always noted our issues in our marriage, but in times of crisis, these small things get magnified.

Our basic problem is the same as everyone else.  You’ve seen the commercials where the husband and wife go shopping and asks for his choice on color for shoes, and other items and whatever he picks, she goes with the other?  Well that is our life in a nutshell.  To be honest I am okay with this on most matters of trivial decision-making.  In fact, I’m partly to blame as I’ve always been attracted to neurotic people.  My dad used to say “It hasn’t been easy” when asked about his marriage.  I’ve never wanted the storybook marriage,.  I want excitement, challenges, change, etc.  My wife has given me all of that and I find many of her quirks very endearing,  but these days my frustration is growing as I try to be helpful.  My wife is asking me which doctor she should go to and choosing the other one, asking me which reconstruction size she should try and going with the other one and on and on and on……I finally lashed out last night and told her that if she wanted to go this alone, then go right ahead.  I told her I was the one feeling like he was on an island and if she had a choice, then don’t ask me anymore.  I wasn’t sure if she was disagreeing with my choices or really choosing what she wanted.  I didn’t want her to choose the wrong one because it had become a habit to go with the other choice.  In the end, I didn’t need to be disagreed with, but rather just have her choose what she wanted.  I told her that this is no longer a game and that I can’t take the rejection along with the stress.  I’m here to provide support but not at the expense of being bashed against the rocks.

Was I being selfish?  Insensitive?  Fortunately my wife came around and apologized.  I told her this has to stop completely.  Not just now, but after 20 years of this, I was flat broken down.  We can’t be like this and revert back to our bad habits when we are faced with this life crisis.  We made up, but it made us both think.

I reminded her that we have to start dreaming again like we said we would do at the beginning.  Separate dreams, big dreams, long-term dreams would help us.  We also needed to work on eliminating some of our faults, our unnecessary habits, and other things which we waste our time and effort on each day.  It was just the contrarian in my wife.  She never rejects my thoughts maliciously.  She just always likes to see the other side of the coin. If my glass is half full, hers is half empty and vice versa.  Some say that we are perfect complements to each other.  Well sometimes being black and white isn’t always the best.  Being gray together helps bring the harmony.

Well we were at least dragged out of our despair with a great email this morning from her canecer surgeon.  She wrote that my wife’s MRI came back clear on her nodes and both breasts other than the cancer we’ve identified.  This increases the chances even more that my wife will not require any sort of chemo, radiation or other unlikely road bumps that will alter her recovery.  The last hurdle will be the final pathology of the cancer and the nodes which occurs post-surgery.  We’re almost there at the top of the mountain it seems and yet we haven’t even started to get our harnesses on.

We are now on a high again on that emotional roller coaster.  The energy is flowing for both of us.  we can now get back to work and focus on being productive in life, work, and our marriage for the next two weeks.

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight

15 days and Counting – Preparing for our Fight against Breast Cancer

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“You know you are in Love when the other person’s individual happiness is more important than the desires you have for the two of you together.”

It is still over 2 weeks to go and we are still waiting for MRI results.  That’s a good thing I think.  We’ve gotten into a good routine and my wife has refocused her mental energy on work and the kids.  I am personally struggling with how to keep things together for the 2-3 weeks where I will have to carry 100% of the physical action while also maintaining a full load of work.  I don’t want my kids to feel like we are tossing them around to other people to drive them everywhere.  My 8-year old son is already getting a little clingy with his mother.  The kids have been excellent though understanding that mommy is going to need them to help out.  I’ve avoided telling them the exact day of the surgery as I don’t want to stress them out the morning that i take them to school.  We’ve basically explained this as another business trip for mom except that she is going to be exhausted for a couple weeks when she gets back.  These next two weeks they are practicing “staying out of mom’s hair” while mom gets work done on her projects.  They are growing up through this process fairly quickly, but after it is all over we are going to have to help them become silly kids again.

Yes, mental distractions are what we are continuing to strive for as we try to remain busy.  My wife told me a few things she is going to do in the next couple days that I would normally have said “No” to, but right now I just want her to keep happy.  The other day I finally awoke to a birthday and didn’t realize it was that day until I got a call that afternoon.  Suddenly if dawned on me that I was definitely distracted by my concern for my wife that normal everyday events which are important to me were no longer a priority.

My wife commented to me last night as we watched the closing ceremonies that having the Olympics on the last two weeks really helped to challenge her inner spirit.  It wasn’t just the stories of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, but the stories of age over youth (Jeannie Longo and Sara Torres), overcoming tragedy (Hugh mcCutcheon), unbearable pain (Zuzana Thomas), handicap (Natalie du Toit), and a year long struggle and grieving for the loss of a loved one (Matthias Steiner) that have inspired her that the mind can heal and drive you to greater things if you want them.

I told her she can have whatever she wants.  We just have to start thinking about what those things are.

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight

More Waiting – A Loving Fight against Breast Cancer

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“The mind is a powerful tool.  Let’s use it to distract and heal us during these trying times.”

As a distance runner, I often found that when the pain hit my legs and abdomen that I could often find something else to focus on to either motivate me or distract me from the pain my body was feeling.  My wife is still feeling the anxiety.  She has developed a cough but I noticed that it goes away when she is not sitting still.  We did a family outing yesterday to a baseball came and her cough magically disappeared.  The same thing happened when we went out that evening with friends.  But as we went to bed, the cough was there again along with her Ricola lozenges.

Still, she is worried.  As I mentioned before, her doctor ordered her a chest X-ray which revealed clear lungs just to make her feel better.  We also had more meetings.  She went in for an optional Genetic test to see if she is a carrier of a rare gene that studies have found is carried my patients with breast cancer showing a predisposition for ovarian cancer.  If your mother had breast and ovarian cancer, it is very likely (50%) that you might have it as well.  We are waiting on that test result.  My wife also had her MRI of her lymph nodes and other chest.  Usually this would have taken place before the meeting with the plastic surgeon, but the scheduling gods were not with us.  There was nothing that could be seen from the initial peek at it, but we will have to wait until tomorrow to hear the results from her doctor.  Hopefully it will be more good news and everything will continue to go as planned.

In the meantime, my wife and I have decided that she needs to get distracted and keep her mind off of things.  She has taken on a huge consulting job that she is going to throw herself into during the next couple of weeks.  I took the kids out today so that she could work on the project, get the kids away from her for a bit and immerse herself.  It gives her something different to talk about and to keep her mind working over the next 12-14 days.

As for me, those runs are distracting me too from the pain.  Only now I can only think of my wife as I go for my runs.  How much I love her,  how much I respect her, and how much I want her to pull out of this better than ever.  Tonight I ran double more normal run as I missed a turn as I was so distracted by my own thoughts.  My body felt good and strong.  I guess the mind really is the most powerful healing tool in the body.