I
think that anyone who is diagnosed with a serious illness will ask the
question, “Why me?” Especially if the person is young, or if it’s a
particularly debilitating illness, it seems all the more frustrating: Why me?
What did I do wrong? How did I bring this on myself?
I was told (immediately after
diagnosis by the doctor who called me with the news) that there was nothing I
could have done to cause (or prevent) this cancer. Others reinforced this idea,
as well as the fact that there was nothing I could do to stop it. Without
medical intervention, of course. However, it’s almost impossible not to
question. It’s human nature to be curious. We need to know the answers; we need
to know the why. I felt like I’d been cursed with a disease out of the blue;
there had to be a reason.
I looked for anything
linked to decreasing your breast cancer risk, and I’d already been doing all of
it. I’d breastfed, exercised, didn’t smoke, and
had a healthy BMI. For several months every year, I eat organic vegetables
straight from my own garden and from the farmer’s markets in town; I was
perplexed as to how I could find food any fresher or healthier than that.
Still, I got cancer.
So,
I looked up every known factor that could have led to an increased risk
of breast cancer. Not a single one applied to me. Nada. I didn’t have even one
risk factor, yet I still got cancer.
Doom-scrolling
one day, I saw a message on a cancer support website that “Cancer doesn’t
care”. The article described so many people who lived healthy lifestyles but
who were still diagnosed with cancer at young ages. There were vegans, fitness
instructors, marathon-runners…pretty much anyone you would imagine to be the
last person on earth to be diagnosed with cancer. It was disturbingly
comforting because it meant I wasn’t the only one that felt unfairly targeted
by this disease. These people were healthier than me! They’d done all the right
things, like me-- quite frankly, way better than me-- and they still weren’t
out of danger. Still, it was a conflicted, confusing feeling that left me
frustrated.
Part
of the frustration was not having any answers. When I finally did get some sort
of answer, it took me in an unexpected direction: I had a CHEK2 genetic
mutation. The CHEK2 gene typically helps with DNA repair; in my case, at any
time, some event could trigger my mutation and this gene would then choose to
not repair my DNA and instead give me cancer. (Note that my degrees are in writing and teaching, not in genetics, so I may be missing some crucial details, but still-- who gave this gene so much power? Did nobody quality
check the CHEK?) Unfortunately, genetic mutations are one of the few risk
factors that people have absolutely no control over. And so, alas, I did have a
risk factor, but one that I couldn’t change. The CHEK2 mutation is thought to
lead to a 20-25% increased risk of breast cancer, as well as an increased
lifetime risk of colon and possibly other cancers (more research is needed).
It’s less common than the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, which carry a greater
lifetime risk of breast cancer and are more well known. Still, known genetic
mutations are only the cause of 5-10% of breast cancers! (Crazy, I know.) Researchers suspect
there are more mutations that simply aren’t yet known, but there is still a
whole lot of mystery in the cancer world.
I
saw this firsthand in my Young Survivor Coalition discussion group the other
day. (We’re a group of women who were diagnosed with breast cancer under age
40.) The women were discussing the idea of stress or trauma as possible causes
of cancer. Some of the women seemed to find comfort in this possibility; again,
I think about that natural human tendency to need a reason for why bad things
happen. Still, most of these ideas regarding stress were dismissed or disproved;
we know that there are other causes of cancer out there, but we simply don’t
know enough about genetics or all the possible environmental risk factors at
this time. Maybe someday oncologists really will have all the answers; for now,
they are well-educated guessers. (I mean that in the nicest way, of course.) They use the evidence available to make the
best predictions possible, but it seems the real reasons behind breast cancer
are still more murky gray than black and white.
As
I continued to question why myself and these other young women were diagnosed
with cancer seemingly out of the blue, I realized that asking myself these
questions wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I could take myself on a downward
spiral asking why bad things happen to good people, but I needed to focus my
attention in a positive direction.
Maybe we don’t need an answer for our
hardships; we need to create our own reason for getting through them. We need
growth even when life forces us through regression. To me, going through
cancer was a little like being a phoenix: I had to go through the fires of
treatment, but I could still be reborn from the ashes.
