ALLEVIATING THE FEAR
COPING WITH BREAST CANCER
THE BIGGEST challenge after a cancer diagnosis is overcoming the fear of pain, suffering, and death. In life, we all face challenges in which we see the right course of action but refuse to take it.
Confucius said that to see what is right and not to do it means a lack of courage, but developing the courage to fight cancer doesn’t mean we don’t experience fear because fear is a natural emotion. What determines our level of courage is how we manage fear. Warriors face fear; cowards run.
My first experience with breast cancer in America was difficult because my case was misdiagnosed for three years, and I was inadvertently given a diagnosis of being another patient with fibrocystic disease. So when the correct diagnosis was made, it was late, and tests at that time had not recognised that the tumour had spread to other areas of my body. For me, a late diagnosis was a tragedy because I had tried to be proactive for three years to have an early diagnosis that would save my life, with simple surgeries and cheaper costs. I was now facing the possibility of difficult, expensive mutilating surgeries and prolonged treatment. I was young and married, with young children.
I tried to cope by remembering that self-preservation is the first law of nature, so there was a natural instinct to survive by whatever means. I recognised that there was a parasitic relationship between me and the cancer, so if I did not feed the disease, it would not grow. With that in mind, it seemed that I had some control over my survival. I learned that chemotherapy works best when the tumour bulk is small, so that in most cases, surgical excision is a good choice to remove the tumour bulk before chemotherapy. Chemotherapy may not kill all cancer cells even after the treatment is over, so when the treatment ends, the few remaining cancer cells are subject to the integrity of the patient’s immune system.