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Living With Breast Cancer

  • Fear

    Posted 4/28/2013 by hhill
      Fear and anxiety are constant companions in the early months or even years of living with breast cancer. As time passes and, if we are lucky and stay well, they diminish, but they rarely vanish forever. All it takes is hearing about a friend whose cancer has recurred or experiencing a symptom that likely will go away but causes panic in the short term or reading something about a woman who has died of breast cancer...and the fear grips us. Read more... Comments (0)

  • Meditation

    Posted 4/17/2013 by hhill
      Once again, full disclosure: I am a (relatively) recent convert to daily meditation, so I am a zealot. My husband and I attended a meditation course in January 2012 and have quite regularly meditated twice a day ever since. On long plane flights, e.g. our recent trip to Africa, we meditated a lot more, and found it truly helped with fatigue and jet lag. On some days, when my schedule is especially busy and unusual (because habit helps), I forget and suddenly realize at bedtime that I have missed meditation. Read more... Comments (0)

  • The Other Shoe

    Posted 4/15/2013 by hhill
      Oh, yes, that proverbial other shoe. We are all indeed poised to hear it drop. Or to feel the noose again around our necks or the sword hanging over our heads or the black cloud getting a little more dense. We know the feeling. I often suggest to women that, whether or not you were a hypochondriac or a worrier before cancer, it is pretty tough not to take on those traits after the diagnosis. After all, since our bodies have proven that they can make a cancer, it is hard to trust that it won't happen again. Since it has happened twice to me (three times if you want to count a relatively minor skin cancert), I surely expect an encore. Read more... Comments (0)

  • Who Suffered Most

    Posted 4/13/2013 by hhill
      This is a perfect companion piece to yesterday's entry about the wonderful Ring Theory. Surely this describes a woman who was unfamiliar with those suggestions! From Joyce Wadler in the New York Times comes this essay about responses to others' problems--as in, my suffering/accident/loss/illness was worse than yours. I often hear this concern described as an issue in some support groups--that is, it can seem as though there is a hierarchy of breast cancer misery, and a woman who needs less treatment than others may be made to feel that she shouldn't complain. I truly hope that no one ever feels that way in one of my groups; I am on alert for such a sequence of feelings, and I think I manage it satisfactorily. Of course some of us need more treatment than others or longer treatment or have even scarier diagnoses, but we are all in this together. Read more... Comments (0)

  • How Not to Say the Wrong Thing

    Posted 4/12/2013 by hhill
      First, a thousand thank yous to Carolyn who sent me this link. I have read many articles about how to support a friend in trouble, and even written a few that attempted to make good suggestions. This is the best. Susan Silk has developed a simple system for how to support your friend and how to take care of yourself. She calls it the "RIng Theory" and the basic plan is: Support In, Dump Out. That will make sense when you read it. Read more... Comments (0)

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330 Brookline Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
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About the Blogger

Hester Hill Schnipper, LICSW, OSW-C is the Manager of Oncology Social Work at BIDMC. For more than thirty years, her daily work at BIDMC has been primarily focused on supporting women with breast cancer. A nationally known writer and speaker, she was the Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation's first Hatcher Survivorship Professor. In 1993, and again in 2005, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through the standard treatments of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and hormonal therapy. These experiences have given her great credibility with her patients and transformed her life's work to her life. Ms. Schnipper lives gratefully with her husband in an ancient farmhouse outside of Boston and spends as much time as possible in a water front cottage on Mt Desert Island. Between them, they have five adult children and seven grandchildren; she claims biological responsibility for two and three of them.

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