Plus Ça Change

I spent part of the day today re-reading a piece I'd written about what it felt like to be diagnosed with breast cancer the first time. My experience wasn't particularly unusual—it featured shock and fear and confusion and panic, first simultaneously and then sequentially.

I've now read a lot of first-person accounts of breast cancer, and most of the stories highlight those early hours and days after diagnosis, when the news is still reverberating and the brain is trying desperately make sense of it.

I'm almost seven years removed from that experience, but it came back to me vividly in the course of reading what I'd written about it. And then, a little later in the day, I was asked to speak to a newly diagnosed young woman, someone who was still in the throes of it. I could hear in her halting voice the uncertainty that surrounded her, and I tried in every way I could to reassure her that things will soon get easier.

So many advances have been made since I was a new patient—better understanding of how breast cancer works, more effective treatments, far greater awareness—and yet we have made no progress in reducing the trauma of diagnosis.

I don't know how many people in the world found out that they had cancer today. But I bet it was a searing experience—one they will be able to recount in great detail many years from now.

Here's how I know:

Do you remember what happened on Monday, March 5, 2001?

I do.

And I always will.