TALKING About Breast Cancer

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…







“Is it OK if I don’t ever want to talk or think about breast cancer for the rest of my life?” my wife asked a few months ago.

“You’ve talked about breast cancer more in the past 20 months that than any dozen people have talked about it in the entire lives!” I said.

“Does that mean, ‘yes’?”

“Uh,” I replied sheepishly, “Yes, it IS OK for you to never talk about or think about breast cancer again for the rest of your life.”

“Good.”

And yet...and yet.

How do you stop talking about and thinking about something that changed everything? I cannot imagine in any real or relevant way, how the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer changed my wife’s life. My imagination, though fantastic (I write science fiction and fantasy, after all!) can’t begin to get itself wrapped around what that actually MEANS.

When I can’t imagine something, I have to TALK about it. The men around me refused to talk about my wife’s breast cancer diagnosis. I think I lost a few friends to their fears of talking about breast cancer – like talking about it would infect their wives. Worse, that talking about it might expose their terror of the possibility of their own wives being diagnosed.

“The chance of a woman having invasive breast cancer some time during her life is about 1 in 8. The chance of dying from breast cancer is about 1 in 36. Breast cancer death rates have been going down. This is probably the result of finding the cancer earlier and better treatment. Right now there are more than 2.9 million breast cancer survivors in the United States.”
(http://www.cancer.org/cancer/breastcancer/overviewguide/breast-cancer-overview-key-statistics)

The truth is that I never thought about it in terms of “what if my wife is diagnosed with breast cancer?”; even though her sister was diagnosed first. I didn’t let it enter my thoughts. So I suppose the fact that guys don’t talk about breast cancer – even AFTER the diagnosis – is just a continuation of the silence we experienced and encouraged BEFORE the diagnosis.

Even today, if you scroll through the 17 comments, three are from men besides me. The others are from women. Of course, it’s impossible to know how many of the 8400 page views are from men and how many are from women. It may be that lots of guys READ about breast cancer but few TALK about it. That’s OK, but the bile and fear that can build up with regards to breast cancer can be debilitating. I know that one thing that has eroded significantly is my faith – I’ll talk about that someday when I’m brave enough. At any rate, this place is still here and as far as I can tell, people still read it, and so I’ll keep talking.

It’s just that sometimes I think it would be good to either talk to someone over coffee or online.

G’day, folks!

Image: http://www.askdrmanny.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/Men%20Coffee.jpg