How Does Breast Cancer Affect a Person's Daily Life
It has been almost three weeks after my surgery. I am still waiting for some results to meet with my oncologist next Monday. And today I can’t help but wonder how breast cancer has affected me. Of course how it affects a person’s daily life is totally depending on the person.
Many doctors have mentioned that some cancer patients don’t handle the cancer news well - and they become so worried, so pessimistic, they can’t go on with their daily lives, they couldn’t sleep well and they lost their appetites. Knowing the extreme examples helps me to understand what I don’t want breast cancer affect my daily life.
Yes, for weeks and months our daily lives are impacted. The uncertainty of the final diagnosis, the unknown of reoccurrence in the future, the debates of different treatment options - all these added stresses. Not to mention the pain, the immobility, the lack of range of motion after surgery. And not to mention for some other people, they have to endured the horrible side effects from the radiation or chemo on their physical bodies.
But in order to win the battle with Breast Cancer, we can’t let those physical distress to impact us mentally. Yes, those are hard for our bodies and when our bodies are in pain, in great distress, we desperately need our minds clear and strong. We can’t think all the time why this happened to me. We need to accept and move on. I was going over online and found Brian Johnson talking about how he helped his brother’s cancer case. He mentioned in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters - danger and opportunity. I know the word immediately how it is written as 危機 - yes it means danger and opportunity if you break down the words. So treating breast cancer as a wake up call, as a new opportunity to live a new life really helps to have a better mind set. And that is what will help us to go on with our personal daily life positively.
It also resonates well with what I learned from the Chinese doctors. After the western treatment finishes - like surgery, radiation, chemo etc. Normally cancer patients will go back to their normal lives. But eastern medicine doesn’t believe so. They believe the body is a whole and the reason why there is cancer is because the system is not in balance. So say if I go back to my usual lifestyle again, then maybe in the future the unbalanced system will need to find another outlet to break - hence the cancer reoccur.
So I am letting Breast Cancer to impact my life in a positive way. I want to identify what I need to change in my daily life - diet, sleeping habits, exercise schedule, mind set. By changing those, it will help me to live life to fullest as I won’t be living in the shadow of breast cancer.
