I don't believe in accidents. --Oprah Winfrey

If you have an interest in how women diagnosed with a devastating disease actually cope, Cheryl Swanson's latest book: Busting Loose, Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't will blow your socks off. Rather than review it at this point, we're reprinting the introduction below:

Introduction



I don’t believe in accidents. -Oprah Winfrey




On August 23, 2003, the day I turned fifty years old, I found a lump in my breast that turned out to be breast cancer. There was a feeling like—my God, how ironic is this? As a woman, you can’t approach the half-century milestone without being a little wistful. But I was turning fifty with a vengeance. I was in the throes of closing the public speaking business I’d owned for a decade, moving to a rural community in Hawaii and writing my first novel.


Something much more important was also at stake. My husband and I were in the final stages of adopting a little girl from Guatemala.


Any cancer diagnosis is dramatic, but timing made mine more dramatic than most. Suddenly, there was a hellish hole gaping in front of me. Could I hold fast to my dreams in spite of the diagnosis? Would I have the energy to drag myself out of bed, much last manage being a mother and doing some artistic work as well? Remember that John Lennon quote: How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?


Close my eyes, six years roll away. I hear the voices of those who thought they knew which way I was facing. My breast surgeon told to pull the plug on the adoption process. Another advisor insisted something called the “chemo brain” would keep me from completing (much less selling) a first novel. A good friend worried that I might expire of loneliness if I gave up my career and moved to a rural community. My accountant told me I couldn’t afford it.


There is no getting around it—a cancer diagnosis causes a thousand deaths to hopes. Women are told they shouldn’t give birth to a child, at least not for a half-decade. They are told they won’t have the energy to keep working a full schedule and absolutely should not change careers while undergoing treatment. They are told that they can’t or shouldn’t adopt, that they should stay with a job they hate—because they might lose their health insurance. They are even told they should stay in a terrible marriage—because otherwise who will take care of them?


And to all of that, I say—Pshaw.


Women can and do take these risks, right after a cancer diagnosis. They hold fast to their dreams against the winds of pain, and use the fragile strength of hope to sustain themselves. They do it because they must do it. Because make no mistake—if we listen to the prohibitions of the nay-sayers and ignore what our heart is telling us—we are putting our very lives at risk.


I don’t want to scare you, but our world, including most of our health care professionals, doesn’t “get” cancer. Prevalent in our times is the shallow and naïve idea that a breast cancer diagnosis is such a calamity that the patient must be urged to hang up the phone on her hopes and dreams. Every day, using the weight and authority of the profession, doctors urge recently diagnosed women to put their life on hold, without any idea of what that might set in motion. Unknowingly, these doctors sometimes send these women along the road to self-destruction. Women who face a cancer diagnosis are in for the fight of their lives and they need a future to fight for, not another reason for despair.


Otherwise? They just might give up.


As each decade passes, we have more tools to combat breast cancer. But is it me? Or do we also seem to have less courage. Since my diagnosis, I have come to believe that the killing of dreams and hopes is the real tragedy of breast cancer in our time. Survival rates from breast cancer have continued to improve. Most women diagnosed with the disease in the next decade will find that their health snaps back to normal surprisingly quickly. Yes, there will be difficult times during treatment and dark days, plenty of them. But in the end, most will ride over the entire crisis like a beach ball on water.


But what about those women who are convinced to alter a cherished plan because of a perceived calamity? In that case, their life will be turned upside down. Their aspirations, hopes and dreams will fall out of their pockets and smash. That is why I believe that those in the “helping professions” who tell patients that there can’t be anything mysterious and uniquely transforming in being extremely ill need to make a noose out of their negativity and hang themselves with it.


Have I shocked you? I don’t mean to, but what cancer taught me is shocking—and it can’t be sugar-coated. There are many excellent breast cancer survivor guides available these days, but Busting Loose from Breast Cancer comes from a different place. While there are many useful books that help women “survive” cancer; Busting Loose from Breast Cancer is designed to help you use an initially frightening diagnosis to liberate yourself. My premise is that breast cancer is not the end of the road, it’s the gift of another beginning. A beginning based on going after what you really want out of life, and damn the consequences.


I agree with Oprah Winfrey. I don’t think there are any accidents. In my case, breast cancer was a clear thread running through everything I’d ever done and been. Because I did not listen to my doctors and advisors, because I allowed myself to believe the disease had a purpose, to teach me, finally, to follow my heart, the year I received my cancer diagnosis was the greatest year of my life.


Don’t get me wrong. It was a ferocious jolt. So ferocious, that there are times when the fear of cancer recurring boomerangs me into an emotional black hole. The struggle is ongoing for all of us. Some women get off easier than others, but in one way or another, no cancer patient entirely escapes the rough waters that lie ahead.


I’m not advocating being reckless—much the opposite. The disease requires each of us to take full responsibility for every moment of our lives, however things turn out. What I’m advocating is recognizing that nobody rescues us from the disease, instead we must rescue ourselves. The problem with “being passive” in the face of peril is that it cuts us off from our ability to act positively.


Many women are still being programmed to be what Virginia Wolf called the “Angel in the House.” From childhood, societal strictures teach females to be “good girls”—to speak in soft, sanitized words and display emotionally restrained, decorous behavior. Before cancer, these women didn’t actually know how to fight; hence they are hamstrung in the most important battle they will ever face.


What I joyously discovered through my own cancer experience was a different model for how women can go through a terrible disease. The women whose stories I tell in Busting Loose from Breast Cancer found that the experience of cancer helped them rediscover and reclaim the fiery wild woman inside. I’m talking about that fiercely alive and ageless “bad girl,” who exists in each of us in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit. Even the most culturally repressed woman has a powerful alter ego inside that the disease gives shape to—like a genie released from a bottle.


Somewhere in the midst of surgery or treatment or chemotherapy, your own genie is going to claw her way out of your core. And there’s no putting her back in the bottle once she’s free. But that’s a good thing, even a great thing; because she’s going to help you sing your song and live your life for the rest of your days. The person you were before cancer? She suffered from an overload of personal anxiety and cultural repression. Frankly, she wasn’t having as much fun as she could have had.


But she’s about to do something huge: survive a devastating disease. Dealing with cancer is going to take her to a new level—where she’s much more frank and able to face things that most women are too fearful or embarrassed to talk about.


So brace yourself. Breast cancer is a roller coaster ride the likes of which you’ve never experienced in your life. A trip full of cries, aches, pains, but also love and heart-felt laughs. I’m going to describe what’s ahead and I promise to tell it like it is. Sometimes I’ll make you laugh and sometimes I’ll scare the bejesus out of you, because I think it’s in your best interest to know the whole realm of strange things that might happen.


Bottom line: How do women find within themselves the necessary stamina to conquer their fear? How do they bust loose of the physical, spiritual and emotional grip of breast cancer? Here’s the answer and I hope it doesn’t stop your blood. We do it by throwing away the repressed “good girl” and all of her hang-ups. We do it by releasing our inner selves for battle. All of our inner selves—the bitch and the angel, the funny and the sad, the dark and the light.


It’s time to steel your nerves and summon your cool and anger and faith. Because the wild woman inside is about to bust loose and the moment she does, you will find yourself strong enough for any fight. From that moment on, we have not just survived, we have triumphed.


Here we go. Hang on tight.


It’s time to BUST LOOSE.

The book's not out yet--but should be available any day now from Amazon.We'll keep you posted.