By Nicole Johnson

Every three minutes a woman in this country is diagnosed with breast cancer. Although I have never had it, I have been deeply inspired by courageous women who have. I’ve written this piece for them.

One of the things you learn early in the ring with cancer is the value of having the right people in your corner. There are plenty of well meaning people who want to help you in your fight with cancer, but you have to be careful. Many will try to help by minimizing your loss—they’ll say things like, “It’s only hair,” or “It’s just a breast.” They have no idea. Honestly, it’s only hair as long as it’s someone else’s. The next person who tries tells you its only hair, ask her about the last time she lost all hers in clumps on the floor. The truth is that people who want to minimize your pain are often seeking to minimize theirs.

Many well-intentioned friends don’t have a clue how to enter into your suffering. Let’s face it, there’s no handbook. No one has yet written Suffering for Dummies (thank God). So while they don’t mean to, some friends might treat your illness with a casual word that falls ridiculously and painfully short of helping. Bless their hearts, they just don’t know. Somehow suffering buys you membership into an exclusive club you never wanted to join. But it doesn’t take long to tell who’s in and who’s not in.

The people who are not in glibly say things like “Life will go on.” What a horrible thing to say! Of course life will go on. It will go on with or without you. That’s one thing that is so maddening. The world was going on when a twelve-year-old opened fire on his classmates. The world was going on when two children lost their father in a car accident. And the world was definitely going on when I got the worst news of my life. Why couldn’t everything just stop? Why doesn’t time stand still for each of us to acknowledge our tragedies? Other mothers were still driving their kids to school and making plans for the weekend, and deciding whether to the put the lamp there or there. STOP! I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. Please stop, just for a minute—I have cancer.

There is nothing like fighting for your life through unspeakable suffering to break you of bumper sticker thinking. It used to be that a bumper sticker was a little reminder to think more deeply about something. Now bumper stickers sound like they are about as deep as the thinking goes. Deep pain makes you see through them quickly. There are no appropriate clichés about cancer any more than there are shortcuts through suffering. There may be good advice like, “You’ll get through this,” but you’ll have to get through it the hard way—by yourself—before you can believe it. The wisest of my comforters simply left their thoughts at my front door until I could receive them. Then they made their way past me into my living room, willing to sit with me in my pain.

Loss is an inevitable part of living. No one had to tell me that. The problem was my heart stubbornly refusing to cooperate with my head. “You’ve lost things before,” my head said, remembering specific toys and football games, and that one high school boyfriend. But soaking in the bathtub, gazing down at the mismatch on my chest, my heart says, “No, nothing like this.” It may be just a body, but it is still my body.

When you have cancer, you get used to hearing people talk about you in third person. Most of the time I just stand there happily invisible while they carry on a conversation around me. It’s probably easier for others to get the medical facts like a news report from someone else, rather than to directly ask you such personal questions. I overheard one woman I don’t even know tell someone else in a whispered tone, “She lost her breast.” She was right, except she said it in a way that made it sound like I’d set it down and forgotten where I’d put it.

There are things that I might call lost, but they weren’t really, because I never looked for them, or missed them when they were gone. A button on the inside of my coat, someone’s phone number I wasn’t going to call anyway—those aren’t losses. “Misplaced” is the grown up word that is better suited for such things. People say, “I’ve misplaced my glasses.” It’s temporary, it’s small, fairly inconsequential, and most of the time replaceable. No one would ever say, “I misplaced my father at an early age.” They would sadly say, “ I lost him.” Real loss is not temporary. It’s not small or inconsequential; it is up-close and personal and irretrievable.

Suppose I was walking to my car from the grocery store and a man grabbed my arm and demanded my wallet. After a split second of thought, I would hand over my wallet and even my arm if I could go free with my life. He might not have a gun, but it wouldn’t be worth it to me to find out. I’d just give him the wallet.

Later I would have time to think about everything that was in my wallet—my license, my money, my credit cards—and it would make me feel sick at my stomach to think about all I’d lost. The proof of my identity, the value of two hundred dollars cash, my insurance card—the loss of these might seem overwhelming, but not so overwhelming that I would question giving them up.

Now suppose I discovered in my haste to hand over my wallet, that the inside stuff had slipped out. That would change everything. I mean, the wallet was nice, but its real value came from what was inside.

A breast, or a wallet—I had to give it up to save my life. But the disease didn’t get the good stuff. All the “me-ness” that makes me me is still there. The me that laughs too loud at the table, the me that cries in sad movies, the me that believes love changes everything. The cancer thief took my breast, but he will come up empty because I still have all the value of what lives underneath it!

© 2002 Nicole Johnson