Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Life Changes

Everyone I've met that has had cancer has acknowledged that it's a life changing experience, and for each of those people, their lives changed in different ways. There are big ways and small ways my life will forever be different. There is, of course, the most obvious change in the fact that I lost a breast this year, but there are also many little things that I'm sure will change. For example, today, for the first time in my life I bought a sunscreen with a 30 SPF - I don't think I've ever worn anything over 15 and even that very sporadically (of course, I also bought sunless tanning spray). I realized with that small purchase my approach to life has changed.

Breast cancer can be environmental or genetic and with the results of my genetic tests being negative, I have to think that my cancer was mainly environmental and wonder what role my lifestyle choices played. I'm not beating myself up about it, but I am looking for change as I move forward. I know that the biggest change I have to make is a life-long commitment to 30 minutes of exercise a day. Until I wound up in the hospital I had been doing quite well with that, but haven't had the energy since then, although now 2 weeks after my last chemotherapy I'm beginning to bypass the afternoon nap and hope to get back to some form of daily exercise. The other, and for anyone who knows me will know this one is truly a big life change, is a change in alcohol consumption. Study after study point to more than 1 drink a day as a breast cancer cause. Well, I’ve certainly consumed enough alcohol to equal one drink a day for the next 200 years! As you can imagine, I haven’t had anything to drink since early January and without making a pledge to be the designated driver for the rest of my life, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how I will change my approach to cocktail hour. I have plenty of time to think about this, as all the literature on Herceptin Treatment discourages alcohol use during treatment and I’ll be receiving Herceptin for another 9 to 10 months.

And then there is the spiritual side. For many years now I’ve been telling my husband we need to do something about our lives – we’re weren’t actively living our lives, we were going from life event to life event and I’ve felt that something was missing. I’ve got my summer reading lined up; starting off with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness for Beginners and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and hope to come to a more enlightened understanding of the big and small pictures and what the future may hold for me now that I’ve had this life changing experience.

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