Afraid of her own body
I am afraid of my breasts.
It isn’t because of anything they’ve done. It’s because of what I dread they might harbour.
Sometimes the news headlines fuel my fear: “Heavy women face greater threat from breast cancer.” “New cancer fear for women taking HRT.” “Alcohol may boost breast cancer risk.” The rest of the time, they confuse me about what I should do to lessen my fear: “Aspirin may reduce risk of breast cancer by a fifth.” “Do breast self-exams work?” “Vitamin D linked to lower breast cancer risk.”
My behaviour isn’t rational. Sometimes the headlines grab my attention and other times I flip quickly past them to avoid taking in the meaning of the words. I lose myself in reading the heart-wrenching survivors’ tales, tears coursing down my face — or I toss the whole section into the recycling bin, afraid that simply thinking about breast cancer will give some errant cell the wrong idea. And I just keep worrying.
The friend of a colleague puts it this way: “I figure it’s a matter of when, not if, I get breast cancer.” I laughed when I heard that, the kind of sad laugh of someone who possesses the same pessimistic gene. (I used to worry that pessimism would cause breast cancer too. Then I saw the headline “Breast cancer link to personality traits debunked.” That should have lessened my concern. But it didn’t.)
Mitigating the risks
I’m tired of being afraid. It’s not that I expect to be able to stop fretting altogether: I just want to figure out what to worry about — and what steps I should take to mitigate my risks as effectively as possible. Is that really too much to ask?
“The biggest risk factor is being female and the risks increase as we get older,” says Diana Ermel, 63, president of the Canadian Breast Cancer Network, an information, education and advocacy group whose board members are all breast cancer survivors.
But gender and age aren’t the only risks. “I divide the risks into two general areas: the things you can’t really do a lot about and the factors we know we can affect,” says Julia Knight, an epidemiologist and researcher at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Knight has the kind of no-nonsense approach of a friend who helps you write a pro-and-con list when you’re trying to figure out which job to take or whether you should dump your boyfriend. And as every worrier knows, when worry is chasing its tail in your head, a list can be a helpful tool for getting it to heel. Genetics — whether your relatives have had breast or other cancers — is on the “can’t do a lot about it” side, since even those who wish they could know they can’t pick their families.
