Having a bad time with worry

awnie1301

Hi

It has been a tough week. I lost a BC warrior friend last week and it has really struck a nerve for me. She was the same age and we had same age kids. She had her original diagnosis in 2001 shortly after the birth of her 2nd baby. Then in 2014 she got a new primary in the same breast. It came back hard in her lungs, liver and bones in May 2020.

I hate that this nasty disease can just sit like that and rear its ugly head years down the road. I coincidentally had my own onco appointment a couple of weeks back and talked to my doctor about my friend. He seemed to feel that was unusual...I don’t believe him. Maybe he is just trying to make me feel better.

My grief has been hitting me in waves. I grieve the loss of my friend and ache for her family but it is so much harder because it could just as easily be me and my family.

Would love to hear any helpful coping strategies. I am struggling...struggling to get one foot in front of the other today...struggling to not end up in a puddle of tears.

Thx

sugarplum

Awnie: how well I remember that feeling from my first loss of a BC friend - the punch in the gut, with equal parts of grief and fear. My friend Donna had almost identical stats to mine and was just a couple of years ahead of me. I had always looked to her as my cheerleader, my torch - if she could stay all right then so could I. My husband said to me then, and still says to me now: HER cancer is not YOUR cancer. Every single one of us has individual risk profiles, lifestyles, and patterns in our disease which make it impossible to draw a straight line between any of our outcomes. Bottom line is, our odds are either 0% or 100% - either we will recur or we won't. Every day we get up hoping we'll come down on the right side of the odds. As my time has gone by, I've become increasingly distracted by other more immediate concerns: two hip replacements, chemo-induced cardiomyopathy leading to a defibrillator implant, the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, and most recently my husband's retirement, his ensuing mid-life crisis, and his relocation to our beach house after 36 years of marriage (at this point I'm just visiting him on weekends).

I completely empathize with you and hope it helps to at least know you are NOT alone.

Hugs - Julie

awnie1301

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply.

That is exactly how it feels...a gut punch. This past year has been a challenge in so many ways, for all of us, and I think this hasn’t helped how this news hit me! My social circle has become very small and I have so few people who understand how I might feel and how this disease can just weigh so heavy on you some days.

Thank you for taking the time to reply...especially when it sounds like you have so much going on in your own like.