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Women
and cancer |
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More than 600,000 women will be diagnosed with cancer this year. Learn what preventive screenings you need to spot problems early, and how local cancer survivors fought, and won, their battles. Nancy Bruno will tell you, matter-of-factly, about the nights she spent vomiting, crouched on the bathroom floor. Or about the days she was too weak to get off the living room couch or hold down a glass of water. Today, the inoperable bone and breast cancer that forced her in 1995 to quit her job as director of Trinity Day School in Milford is in remission. But she still vividly remembers what it was like taking 20 pills a day for chemo-therapy and not being able to think about anything but how she was going to survive each day. Blood tests, doctor appointments and then radiation treatments replaced the time she used to spend going out with friends, walking on the beach and just plain living — enjoying her beach house and her sons Dylan, now 26, and Chris, 32. |
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“With cancer, everything changes. You’re coming to grips with your whole life and asking questions like ‘Why me?’ and ‘What bad thing did I do to be punished like this?’ ” explains Bruno, 56. According to the American Cancer Society, more than 600,000 women will be diagnosed with cancer this year. Many of them, like Bruno, will come from low-risk categories, meaning they don’t smoke; they eat diets high in fruits and vegetables; and they exercise regularly. Up until the morning Bruno found out she had cancer, she was biking 10 miles every other day and playing tennis at least twice a week. She also faithfully went to her gynecologist each year for a checkup and underwent regular mammograms. “And then, boom, I was in a fight for my life. And it’s not over yet,” Bruno adds, “because there are no guarantees my cancer won’t come back. I just have to live the best I can and believe.” Someone to lean on Probably no words can describe the shock, confusion and feelings of loss and betrayal that come from hearing “You have cancer.” Although it’s a phrase difficult for anyone to hear, it can be particularly hard for women who, in many families, are the ones who take care of everyone else. So what happens when the main caregiver needs the care? “You don’t think,” Michael Stern of Orange says simply. “You just do what needs to be done to keep everyone going.” When his wife Kathleen was undergoing seven weeks of radiation therapy for breast cancer, Michael teamed up with daughter Kate, 22, and son David, 25, to take care of all the meals, laundry and other chores at home. This gave Kathleen the chance to focus on herself and her treatments, and be as much or as little a part of the daily routine as she was up to. While Bruno was receiving chemo-therapy, her ex-husband Scott put his acting career on hold and left New York City to become her primary caregiver. He was as much a protector as he was a nursemaid, many nights keeping the television remote pointed at the screen to quickly change a program or an ad that might upset Bruno. “I was so upset and sick, and feeling betrayed by my body, that I couldn’t see anything tragic, whether it was an accident, a person in a wheelchair, or even one of those programs on the Discovery Channel, where one animal eats another one,” Bruno remembers. “Scott became the ‘Official TV Monitor’ and did just so many other things for me, too.” According to Joseph Cardinale, M.D., director of Radiation Oncology at the Hospital of Saint Raphael, there’s no substitute for a supportive family when it comes to battling cancer. “The patient may be the one with cancer, but the problem is not hers alone. I always encourage the family to come in and be a part of the patient’s treatment. Support for everyone involved is essential,” he says. However, the word “support” means different things to different people. Not everyone has a strong home support system. Some people live alone, have no living family and few friends. There are also many patients who don’t want to involve their families with the weighty issues that accompany cancer; they’re afraid their disease makes them a “burden.” Others — like Amy Chaiklin of Bloomfield — find they need time alone to think and heal and work through their emotions. For her, the constant phone calls, gifts and visits made dealing with the several surgeries, and aggressive chemotherapy, she needed to fight ovarian cancer that much harder. “I’m thankful for all the support I had, because I know it was out of love,” says Chaiklin, 36. “But at one point, I was surrounded by so many flowers, that I felt like I was at a funeral. What I really needed was to be left alone for a while.” So, she was truthful. She told her friends and family that while she was at the hospital receiving five-hour chemotherapy treatments, she really did need someone there to hold her hand. But at home, she wanted to be alone. “But I’ll tell you, without my dog, I wouldn’t be here,” Chaiklin says of her terrier-collie Sparky, 3. “He was there for me 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when I wanted to snuggle or cry.” Learning to cope With cancer, how a person copes is not as important as that the person does cope in some way — any way, says Cardinale, who’s board-certified in radiation oncology. Just the nature of cancer causes changes in friendships, marriages and other family interactions as the patient focuses on her own needs and treatments and, unavoidably, at least somewhat distances herself from loved ones. Many people find the support services they need in these tough times through group meetings, where participants share stories (so often similar) of what they, too, are going through and how cancer is affecting their lives. According to Vanna Dest, R.N., a radiation/oncology clinical nurse specialist who runs patient and caregiver groups at Saint Raphael’s, those who attend meetings don’t just talk about treatments and sickness. Many share feelings of sadness and depression, as well as fears about death. “We talk a lot about losses,” Dest adds. “With cancer, there’s more than a loss of a healthy being. There’s loss of a normal lifestyle, of control, of sexuality and of independence.” In fact, it’s often in support groups that patients and their caregivers learn to develop a mutually supportive relationship, as both deal with their fears and frustrations. Emotions in these meetings often fly high, but that means those all-important communication lines are open, says Andrea Silber, M.D., director of Cancer Control and Early Detection at the Father Michael J. McGivney Center for Cancer Care at the Hospital of Saint Raphael.
Pictured: Cancer survivor Nancy Bruno gets a squeeze from her oncologist, Andrea Silber, M.D., at the Father Michael J. McGivney Center for Cancer Care at the Hospital of Saint Raphael.
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