Being diagnosed with cancer is devastating, there’s nothing like the impact of those three little words, “you have cancer.” I know this only too well as a 11-year survivor and as someone whose Mom, Dad, Aunts and Grandpa have battled with the disease.
At the time of my diagnosis I was shell shocked, as most of us are. I was even more confused by the variety of treatment choices offered me. Decisions about a lumpectomy or mastectomy, a TRAM flap or silicone or saline implants were all part of this challenging time.
While I’m a big proponent of having choice, after all, it is our body, it was one of the few times in my life where I would have loved to have passed off the decisions to someone else. But that wasn’t an option and so I made my own decision, after lots of reading and interviewing.
While no one had an issue with my choices, this isn’t always the case. I had a friend who chose alternative cancer treatments, to many of her friends dismay. My own Mom, after two brutual rounds of chemotherapy announced that she was done regardless of what her oncologist said. Her decision was incredibly upsetting to me, but as someone who had just gone through her own cancer journey, I felt strongly that the decision around her cancer treatment was hers to make.
