10 things breast cancer taught me
Feel your feelings, don’t be deceived by appearances and accept what life gives you. After surviving breast cancer and opting for a double mastectomy, Annabel Chown has a new perspective on life
Annabel Chown shares her experience and her new perspective
1 LIFE WILL SURPRISE YOU (BUT NOT ALWAYS IN GOOD WAYS!)
Breast cancer wasn’t even on my radar in May
2002 when, aged 31, I headed to New York for a long weekend to visit my friend Paul and hang out at galleries, cocktail bars and Jivamukti yoga classes. But 24 hours after my return, I woke up from a minor operation, which was meant to remove an apparently benign lump, to be told I had cancer. I was plunged into five months of chemotherapy, followed by six weeks of radiotherapy. Five years later, my oncologist gave me the all clear. Finally, I could relax. But a couple of years on, two of my first cousins were diagnosed with breast cancer. A coincidence, I tried to persuade myself. Instead, we discovered my father’s side of the family carries the BRCA1 gene mutation and my risk of a new breast cancer developing was now as high as 80%. My surgeon recommended thinking about a risk-reducing double mastectomy. At that point, I couldn’t face it, so opted instead for high-level annual MRI screenings.
2 APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEPTIVE
Losing my hair from my chemo was possibly my lowest moment. It was shoulder length, thick and wavy. Naturally dark brown, I’d recently dyed it auburn. It came out in clumps one morning in the shower. My mum took me to Trendco in Notting Hill to buy a wig. The closest match I could find was bobbed, light brown and straight. I pretended I’d cut my hair, changed colour and started getting blow drys. No-one had a clue. Instead, they told me how amazing my hair looked. “I much prefer it like this. Can I get your hairdresser’s number?” someone even said. It reminded me that often we have no idea what’s really going on behind the seemingly flawless exteriors people present.
3Feel your feelings
“You have to think positively,” I was told again and again by my mum, by my friends. But a cancer diagnosis is a huge shock and brings up a ton of raw emotions: fear, sadness, anger, to name but a few. Experience has taught me it’s a hell of a lot more healing to let yourself feel things. That said, I made sure not to fall into an eternal pit of fear, and to keep faith that I could recover. Gathering positive stories really helped, like the one an Australian nurse shared when I was feeling terrified on the morning after my initial surgery, about her grandmother who’d had breast cancer aged 30 and lived until 90.
4 LIFE GIVES YOU WHAT YOU ASK FOR, NOT ALWAYS WHAT YOU WANT
“I wish I had more time. Time to look after myself, to do things like meditation,” I’d written in my diary a month before I was diagnosed. I was working 60-hour weeks as an architect, designing the Urban Retreat spa at Harrods. Suddenly, I had the whole summer off. It was bittersweet, but in between chemo sessions and