Link Found Between Stress and Breast Cancer

There are mulitple studies (just out in the past week) linking breast cancer recurrence and stress. I'm excerpting a section of Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't that deals directly with stress. If you're stressed right now, go take a walk! Then come back and read. 

Finding a new way to handle stress might save your life.

Tame Career and Personal Stress


Life is not a stress rehearsal.
                                    -Anonymous

If we don’t want to know something bad enough, we never let the thought reach our conscious awareness. Every doctor who works with cancer patients has seen patients ignore symptoms that should have seriously alarmed them. It’s too easy to blame this on ignorance. The truth is, it’s rarely ignorance. Instead, the problem goes much deeper.

Nobody comes to breast cancer as a blank slate. The first time I married I did it in four months—from first date to altar. Looking back, I have no idea why I married whom I did. I’d like to blame it on love, but the cause was simpler and possibly more common—plain, unadulterated stupidity.

I sought counseling; I read books; I went to workshops. I even allowed myself to be deprogrammed by an ex-CIA agent who was an expert on brain-washing. Like a lot of women married to men with whom they have nothing in common, I actually thought all this effort was getting me somewhere. And then came year ten, when my frog-who-never-turned-into-a- prince hopped away. To swim in another pond with a much younger and prettier amphibian.

I was never so relieved in my life.

A year after that, I began making my living as a professional speaker. Standing at the podium in my “power suit,” I’d pour out the adrenalin. This was huge, a big change for me. Essentially shy, I found I could do something that would give most everyone I knew anxiety attacks. I couldn’t have made the transformation if I’d still been married—I wouldn’t have given myself the psychic space to change, much less the opportunity for the non-stop international travel required to build a reputation.

Even as a single woman, the work was difficult—filled with migraines, jet-lag, sleepless nights in sterile hotel rooms. In the beginning, I spoke on marketing and patient care and my audiences were mostly comprised of dentists. Dentists are generally good natured, but eventually I also started doing presentations to groups of physicians. If you make a mistake in front of a group of physicians—with their incredible perspicacity and egos—be prepared to be turned into a vomiting wretch (while of course remaining completely nonchalant on the surface.)

As all public speakers soon realize, everything is your fault when you are the one behind the microphone. When the equipment malfunctions through no fault of your own, it’s still your fault. I once spoke at Cornell University’s North Shore Medical Hospital to approximately 100 doctors for an entire afternoon in pitch darkness. A brown-out in city’s main power grid was the cause, but it was still all my fault.

Even when all the equipment works and you’re on your toes mentally, you’re under constant stress. When you’re on the speaking circuit, everything is an occasion for public disgrace. And if you’re not where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there, it’s also an occasion for great financial loss. (Don’t get me started on plane delays when you owe the organizer $15,000 if you don’t show up on time for the gig.)

If your plane actually arrives on schedule, the next morning you’ll still be doing your hair and make-up out of a suitcase you were too tired to unpack the night before. The next day will start with a cab or limo in pitch darkness to the hospital, medical college or conventional hall, where you stand on your feet all day, thinking: I have to pee, I have to pee…

My speaking gigs often went well. I speak from my heart and usually feel as if I make some kind of connection with my audience. But I was always overbooked and looking back, I believe the only reason I persisted was that I was like many of the women of my generation—addicted to living in the eye of a hurricane. I operated on two basic emotions in those days—panic and barely suppressed panic. I stayed unbelievably busy so I wouldn’t realize I was unbelievably overwhelmed.

Most women get their cancer diagnosis in their forties and fifties and by that time we have come to believe they’re stronger than any problem. What most of us don’t understand is that our brains are swamped and our bodies are tired, our blood pressure is up, our serotonin levels are down, our nerves are shot and our core is saggy. In fact, we are in the worst condition of our lives.

It amazes me sometimes that women like me survive, but I did, and we do, and then comes cancer. With no warning, we step out of the eye and into the actual hurricane. I can handle this easily; I’ve handled worse, we think.

How wrong we are. If we were honest, we would admit that we’re already facing challenges that are more than we can actually bear.

Millions of women around the globe go through life this way and just about as many men. We automatically conceal our distress no matter what is happening to us. Disoriented and lost, we keep moving, never asking if we’re going in the wrong direction. Internally, we are coming apart, but we are too stubborn to admit anything is wrong even to ourselves. We know what we’re doing is killing us inside, but pride stands in the way.

The illusion of personal power over a situation in which you are powerless will damage you much worse than anything that is actually in the situation. Cancer makes us accept that there are limits to our power. What a gift that is! That realization alone makes not just the disease but everything in life much easier to handle.

Once we start telling ourselves the truth, it’s like a light is turned on, our whole lives are illuminated and we can get at the root of the problem. We can begin to hash out who we are and what we actually want and what matters to us most.

Over and over, women told me the trauma of the disease became an empowering turning point for them. They felt it helped them spur themselves to new ambitions, new careers and new loves.

It’s never easy, because cancer is a genuine hurricane. The disease seizes us and pulls us where we never wanted to go, while we look in vain for safety ropes. We cling to each other, we cling to ourselves, we cling to whatever comes hurtling out of the darkness until finally, there’s nothing left to cling to.

Willfully and passionately we may disagree, and insist we aren’t hostage to family history, that we are the masters of our fates. But we’ll see who blinks. We can parody safety, the perfect family, the perfect marriage, the perfect career, but we’re teetering on the edge.


Excerpted from Busting Loose: Cancer Survivors Tell You What Your Doctor Won't, from Zumaya Publications,