Dena Brownstein is a pediatric emergency physician who retired in 2020 after a 35-year career.
Having cancer can be a lonely and isolating experience. Crossing the chasm between being a doctor and a patient, “the doer and the done to,” as I characterize it in my piece “Amazonia” (Intima, Spring 2022), is dislocating. One can find oneself, as I did, “stripped of agency,” even with a wealth of medical knowledge, connections and resources.
In their essay “Resisting Breast Cancer Culture: Two Stories” (Intima, Spring 2014), Judith Cohen and Sarah Sutro argue that allowing a breast cancer diagnosis to define you as a person is an act of submission to the dominant culture. Whether it is the pressure to join the ranks of pink-ribboned 10K walking warriors, or to reflexively choose breast reconstruction after mastectomy, there are societal forces that work to subvert your better instincts, your claim on yourself as a whole human being with well-defined values, accomplishments and interests. In their piece, they carefully construct biographies of who they were before, during and after the tedium and tolls of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. They demand recognition as three-dimensional characters in their unique life dramas, defying stereotypes. We see them as complex and enabled individuals, refusing to be boxed in as “survivors.”
Enduring cancer should not be performative. There are no standards of behavior that apply to every woman who finds herself weighing the demands of surgery, radiation or chemo against those of family, profession or self-preservation. I had the luxury of stepping away from doctoring during my ordeal, and of stepping back into my career when I emerged “to reclaim my uncertain life.” Other women continue at their jobs throughout treatment, by choice or by necessity. Some proudly wear scars on flat chests, others seek complex surgical solutions in order to feel whole. Depression is not a weakness of character when you are teetering on the edge of the abyss, nor is it a healthy dose of denial, a determination to power through with a conviction that you will come out the other side.
There is no right or wrong way to “do” breast cancer. Neither the medical establishment, well-meaning friends and family, nor our sisters in cancer can or should attempt to define any woman’s social and emotional path through an experience that no one would choose, but that chooses so many.
Dena Brownstein is a pediatric emergency physician who retired in 2020 after a 35-year career.