How to Cope With Breast Cancer: 2011

Coping With and Surviving Breast Cancer

You can improve your emotional health and reduce your physical symptoms with good coping strategies. A study published in the Journal of Psychosocial Oncology reports that women who get help with pain and emotional distress have lower levels of anxiety, fatigue and depression. Here are some ways to cope with your emotions:

Communicate with family and friends
Maintain intimacy (if you have a partner)
Visit with a counselor or spiritual director
Join a support group
Express your needs and ask for help
Report your symptoms to your healthcare team
Keep a log of medical visits, save test results, keep receipts
Educate yourself about your cancer and treatments
Exercise
Make plans for a crisis

Getting Help for Emotions Is Not a Sign of Weakness

You may feel under pressure to “be strong” or “act brave” when you least feel that way. Perhaps you don’t easily share your feelings with others. You may be in a position of responsibility and trust, and feel like you must contain your fears and hide your disease or the effects of treatment. Sharing these feelings and struggles may make you feel vulnerable. A study published in the Journal of Personality shows that women with breast cancer who do express their anger, fear, sadness, and affection in a group setting live longer than women who suppress these emotions. Here are some ways to express your emotions and boost your emotional and physical health:

Make time to talk to family members
Communicate with friends and coworkers
Attend a support group, or join an online support list
Find a good therapist and commit to regular visits

Take-Home Message
Your feelings about breast cancer and its affect on your body, family, relationships, finances, and mortality are valid and normal. Expressing your emotions and needs will help boost your mental and physical health. Letting it out lets you live longer!

10 Ways to Cope with Breast Cancer

A diagnosis of breast cancer is often demoralizing, and treatment can be tough on the body, mind, and spirit. But you can and should find ways to cope with your diagnosis and treatment, like these women below who helped themselves to heal -- sometimes in unexpected ways.

Writing & Talking About Your Diagnosis

A diagnosis of breast cancer comes as a devastating blow to the women who hear those two words. Many of the women, in the prime of life, find themselves feeling blindsided by the disease -- betrayed by their own bodies.

Some women, like Chrissy Hooper, 25 at the age of diagnosis, find themselves unable to sleep after hearing the news, instead poring over any breast cancer literature they can get their hands on.
Eventually, the diagnosis begins to sink in and they undergo treatment for the cancer, but that's not all. They must find a way to cope and heal after hearing such life-altering news.
Just like each disease is different, each woman's way of dealing with a diagnosis of breast cancer remains unique and personal. Here are their stories.

1. Online Journaling

Before her diagnosis of Stage II invasive lobular carcinoma, Stacey Hooper of Vancouver, British Columbia, had only considered writing a weblog, a type of online journal. Upon hearing news of her diagnosis in February 2005, the former special effects costumer for the film industry started her blog, Von Krankipantzen.
A single, 35-year-old woman, Hooper wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and family and let them know about her treatment. She credits her cancer as a means of opening herself up through her writing and expressing her new life after a cancer diagnosis.

2. Talking It Out

Since her diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer in 1998 at the age of 69, Marian Cromley has talked to 106 women who have walked in her shoes.
Cromley, who lives in Falls Church, Virginia, participates in Y-Me's Survivor Match Program, which pairs women who call Y-Me's hotline with a peer counselor who has the same diagnosis. The program trains peer counselors to provide both information and hope to their callers.
As a peer counselor, Cromley introduces herself as having the caller's same diagnosis nine years ago and that she's "cancer free, alive and kicking."

3. Staying Physically Active Exercise

Lanita Moss had an unexpected bump in the road while training for a marathon in 1996: a diagnosis of Paget's disease (often referred to as Paget's disease of the nipple or Paget's disease of the breast; not associated with Paget's disease of the bone), a rare form of breast cancer, at age 32.
Since she did not have lymph node involvement, Moss opted for a double mastectomy and continued training for the New York City Marathon, noting her plans would have halted had she undergone chemotherapy and radiation.
For Moss, the Vice-President and co-founder of the Young Survival Coalition, an advocacy group for women 40 and under living with breast cancer, having something to focus on outside of her disease helped her tremendously.

4. Dancing

Although she always enjoyed listening to music, Monica McAghon never considered taking up dancing until a friend gave her classes as a gift.
Doctors diagnosed McAghon with infiltrating ductal-lobular carcinoma in fall 1998 at the age of 46. Prior to her mastectomy and chemotherapy, she had always considered herself a sports-oriented person. Though short on experience, McAghon decided to attend a "Healing Dance" class offered by a Middle Eastern dancer, Tahya (who goes by a single name), in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Tahya's Web site calls dance a healing tool to help you rediscover "a heightened sense of creativity, femininity, and self-esteem."

5. Massage

Before Elizabeth Swaringen could undergo a single mastectomy for ductal carcinoma in situ in 2004, she had to do something for herself: She scheduled a massage.
"It seemed that having a massage was a logical thing to do before the surgery," says Swaringen, who lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina. "I'm sure that massage had an impact on my being calm (the day of surgery)."
Swaringen, a freelance writer who was diagnosed at age 48 through a routine mammogram, underwent massage at Cornucopia House, a cancer support center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that offers services for free to anyone affected by cancer.

6. Yoga

Although she had an "always on the move" life as a full-time graduate student, having a mastectomy left 26-year-old Chrissy Hufford feeling inactive.
On the recommendation of a physical therapist, Hufford, diagnosed with Stage II ductal carcinoma in February 2006, started taking yoga classes. She says she enjoys yoga because she can relax and do it at her own pace. "On my bad days, when I'm in a lot of pain, it can be hard to get into, but it is always relaxing," says Hufford, who lives in Pennsylvaniaz.
Elizabeth Swaringen had practiced yoga for three years and feels it helped her recover from her mastectomy. "I feel like doing yoga made a difference in my range of motion post-surgery," she says, adding that she was able to reach the top of a doorway not long after her mastectomy

7. Humor

Before her diagnosis of Stage I breast cancer in 2001, Miriam Engelberg imagined herself as one of the "noble" people with cancer, should it happen to her. Instead, she found herself, at age 43, receiving chemotherapy and thinking of the absurdity of it all.
She put pencil to paper, resorting to something she had always loved: drawing comics. Out of that came a comic book published in May 2006: Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics (Harper Paperbacks).
The title comes as a kickback to one of the ways Engelberg, who is married with a 9-year-old son, has coped with her cancer as it progressed to Stage IV: Doing what she needs to do to get through the day, be it watching TV or reading an issue of People magazine.

8 . Art

When it comes to describing her feelings of a diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ in 1991, Merijane Block, a writer from San Francisco, has no holds barred.
"I was scared out of my mind and had anxiety," says Block, who was diagnosed at the age of 38. "I needed a forum [to express myself]."
She helped found Art.Rage.Us, a traveling exhibit of art and writings created by women with breast cancer, in 1996 after receiving news that her cancer had metastasized.
At the time, Block wrote every day for three years, though her diagnosis of breast cancer helped change the topic.

9. Advocacy

After a diagnosis of Stage II HER2-positive breast cancer in her right breast at 34, Jennifer Levinson had a bilateral mastectomy (choosing to have her left breast removed as a prophylactic measure) and went on living her life as a young, bald, cancer patient. Many might feel powerless with such an identity, but Levinson used her appearance to demand the attention of some important lawmakers.
After her diagnosis in 2000, Levinson, who lives in Florida, became an activist for breast cancer, attending conferences and lobbying politicians in Washington for more research on the disease. She also became a three-time National Breast Cancer Coalition team leader for their national lobby day.

10. Awareness

Life changed for Sue Keitel the day she had her chest covered in plaster. She was diagnosed in October 2005 at 48 with invasive lobular carcinoma and underwent a lumpectomy. Eventually, she chose to participate in Mamorial, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that takes molds of breasts in all stages of the cancer treatment process. The group then turns those "life casts" into resin breasts that will tour the country, raising awareness about breast cancer.
Keitel considers her breast cast "emotional comfort... It gave me the opportunity to believe that my body was not as horrible as I thought it was," she says. "...All of a sudden, you realize you're not the only one... It is a community. It gives you emotional support."

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