Psychologist Dr Cordelia Galgut was used to supporting women with breast cancer. But after her own diagnosis she truly understood what they were going through.
Psychologist Dr Cordelia Galgut was used to supporting women with breast cancer. But it was only after her own diagnosis that she truly understood what they were going through.
I hadn’t understood the emotional effects
I had been supporting women with breast cancer as a psychologist long before I was diagnosed myself in 2004.
I remember thinking I knew well enough what my patients were going through. There was a kind of complacency about me. I was so shocked by the difference between what I thought a diagnosis of breast cancer would mean, and what the whole process after was actually like.
I had two lots of surgery
A few months after my first diagnosis and surgery I started to feel that there was something wrong in the other breast. Later that year, I was diagnosed with another, bigger tumour in the other breast. So I had two lots of surgery, and six weeks of radiotherapy to each breast, then hormone therapy.
It took me a while to realise I was in shock
With any life trauma, unless you’ve been through it yourself, you don’t really know the awful shock of it, and just how long and complicated a process it is.
Shock is not just something you feel and then it goes away. It endures. And it wasn’t until about three years after I was diagnosed that I started to properly realise I was in shock. For me, because I had two diagnoses, it was a double whammy of shocks.
It stumped me as a psychologist. I was like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
There’s no linear process for coming to terms with it
I had been taught as a psychologist that there are different ‘stages of grief’, and that after huge life trauma people generally go through these stages – such as denial, shock and anger – in a linear way. I didn’t at all in the ways I expected to.
Prior to being diagnosed myself I thought: ‘You have your operation, you have your treatment, you’re relatively all right, and you just move on.’ But it’s like the death of someone close to you. You just have to try to live alongside it as best you can, rather than trying to move on and get over it. How can we? We see our scars every day, and fear recurrence and spread.
I focus on what I can do rather than what I cannot do
I also remind myself that it’s OK to feel down about it. I say to myself: ‘No matter what anybody else says, how I feel is real.’ I’ve spoken to many others for the book I’m writing who feel the same, and I know it’s justifiable that I feel the way I feel.
Give yourself time to grieve
It’s important to give yourself the time to grieve and to express the negative feelings about your situation.
I wrote a poem telling those who haven't had breast cancer how the things people say make me feel:
Tell me instead that you have an open heart
And an open mind.
That you’ll listen,
That you’ll try and understand,
Even when what I’m saying sounds preposterous to you.
It is my reality.
Excerpt from 'Please Don’t', published in Emotional Support through Breast Cancer by Dr Cordelia Calgut (2013).
There’s no right way of coping
In a sense, living with the fall-out of breast cancer over the years, we can be our own worst enemies because there’s no ‘right way’ of coping with a diagnosis. I talk to women and they say ‘I’m fine’, but then you find out their relationships and sex lives are affected, they have aches and pains and worse symptoms, as well. I think we can often be in denial ourselves.
There’s no right way to cope at all, but it probably helps to be aware of unhelpful patterns, like not really saying what’s on our minds.
Being kind to yourself
Try not to put too much pressure on yourself to move forward, and set the bar as low as possible in terms of what you’re ‘expected’ to do. Try to accept that you’re going to feel the way you feel and that it’s normal, it’s natural.
I find it helpful to say affirming statements, or put Post-it Notes around the place, such as:
- ‘I’m doing really well at getting through this’ – say that to yourself over and over again
- ‘I’m allowed to feel angry and upset’ – you can allow yourself to vent like that in private
- ‘I’m allowed to feel OK, I’m allowed to feel positive, and I’m allowed to feel anxious. I don’t have to bottle it all up’
- ‘It’s rational to feel frightened of recurrence. It’s normal to have long-term effects’
I think the biggest thing is allowing yourself to validate how you really feel. Having the courage to speak out about how you feel – if you can – can be empowering as well.
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