Supporting Loved Ones With Breast Cancer

Take a Memo

When a doctor announces that you have breast cancer, it's hard to hear much else. Your mind starts spinning so fast that everything can sound like gibberish. For this reason, Laura says, having her sister-in-law Karolann accompany her to every doctor's appointment was invaluable. "She brought an orange silk-covered notebook with her and filled it with doctors' names, fax numbers, and insurance forms," says Laura. "You're dealing with oncologists, radiologists, gynecologists, surgeons. To have all that information in one place was genius."
 
Since Cathy's four children are scattered across the country, from New York to Oregon, she was particularly relieved when her colleague Janelle offered to accompany her to doctor's meetings.
 
"I was so emotionally involved, I could not even hear straight, let alone remember everything," she says. "Janelle took notes that I could reference later, when my head was clear." And sometimes patients need more than just a note taker―they need an advocate. When Amy, Cathy's 43-year-old daughter in New York City, heard that her mother was going to have to wait eight weeks for an operation in Fargo, North Dakota, she found a specialist elsewhere who could do the surgery sooner.
 
 
 

Understand Her Physical Changes

The irony of breast cancer is that the treatment feels much worse than the cancer itself. "I didn't feel sick until after the cancer was removed," Beth says. After Beth had a double mastectomy, she woke up "bandaged and sore, with drains sticking out of my armpits." She had to sleep sitting up for two weeks. "I stayed on the couch, and Todd [her future husband] slept on the floor," she says. "I'd have to wake him to give me an oxycodone because I couldn't lift my arms or twist open the bottle."
 
Once she had healed from the surgery, Beth still had chemotherapy to face. "I was dreading it," she says. "But then a clump of hair came out in my hands in the shower. I wanted to control this side effect before it controlled me." So Beth called her best friend, Jenn, whose own mother had died of cancer, and asked her to come over to cut her hair. "Jenn gave me a mullet, then a Mohawk," Beth says. "We were laughing at first, but by the time she finally cut it all off, we were both in floods of tears. But it felt good to be proactive and even better to be with a friend who understood."