Bree Stilwell

With all that sticky anticipation, I’ve set some intentions around preserving my own time, adding some pounds and reps to what isn’t exactly my strongest muscle—saying no.

My first opportunity to flex came just last week, with a request for some parent/class involvement. Out of respect for the individual I’ll mention shortly, the specifics will remain loose. To note, however, I have enough skin in this particular game that I thought longer and harder about my no. I also put a condition on it—that I’d need more info before the yes, calling it a hard maybe.

The info needed to come from another parent, with whom I met for the first time over a set of late afternoon iced teas. We sat outside a local-favorite coffee shop, shaded under trees and an oversized umbrella from the late-August heat snap.

We covered the introductory basics first, then chatting over some calendar-specific topics. She mentioned she’d be out of the mix in early September for a surgical procedure, but expected a fairly brief recovery.

I wished her exactly that, adding that I hoped it wasn’t anything particularly ‘serious.’ (The things we say in conversation… I write these words and I cringe them, but in the moment, it really felt like the only appropriate and most supportive gesture.)

She paused, looked down into her iced tea, seemingly through the straw and into any answers that lay at the bottom of her compostable cup. I knew exactly, and I mean, precisely, what she was going to say.

‘Well… it is serious, actually. I found out a few months ago that I have stage I breast cancer.’

I knew what she was going to say because I’ve said these words myself. Countless times, over the course of nearly eleven years. In varied company and with details that changed as my cancer did, but the general message, and the challenge for the messenger, were always exactly the same.

She spoke freely, and our relationship changed immediately—as yet unbeknownst to her, but acutely clear to me. Focus pulled, the heat, the coffee shop lawn littered with co-ed’s returned from their summer vacations, any sense of next boxes to check, all vanished.

It’s a fascinating exercise in humanity, having difficult conversations like these. She recognized in me, as I know I did when taking the role of hard news giver vs. receiver, an unexpected and thus unusual comfort with the topic. One knows the difference somehow, between someone ready to listen because they’ve been there in a similar capacity, and someone deeply restless because they’ve haven’t yet been tapped on the shoulder by death.

Something inside this woman recognized me and my readiness, amplified by the outward support I offered, and so she continued telling the story of how she arrived at the starting line of a race she never anticipated running.

I talk to a lot of women about breast cancer. And with 1 in 6 women being diagnosed at some point in their lifetime, it’s happening more and more frequently.

Connections are typically borne of my writing, a video testimonial I contributed to a documentary on metabolic therapies, my coaching and mentoring practice or from referrals via family and friends.

Sometimes though, as evidenced this last week, we have the universe to thank. And by thank, I also mean curse. It’s both/and, my relief in being able to provide any manner of support for this woman, and also deep rage in having to do it yet again. That I can’t go have a fucking iced tea with another mom, under the auspices of talking about social outings for our damned kids, without cancer taking over is absolutely maddening.

Cancer, breast cancer in women in particular, has become the energy vampire of an entire era. It butts into conversations it has zero business in, railroads, sucks the blood out of relationships, families, and most tragic of all, entire lives.

I was already getting hot through the course of hearing yet another story of cancer found and on the verge of treatment, maintaining the restraint I know is so important during the early months of receiving any manner of life-threatening diagnoses.

I was good, she was good, we were weaving our stories and humanity together gently and slowly.

But then she said something that completely shattered the balance, recounting words from her oncologist that I honestly thought were simply non-applicable at this point, archaic language, not unlike saying ‘I need to find a pay phone’ or calling someone a ‘yuppie.’ With increasing agitation, she shared how her treating physician, the specialist who by society’s grand vision is tasked with prolonging this woman’s life, said:

‘It’s not your fault. You’re just unlucky.’

Know this. Every single time we tell a woman that her cancer isn’t her fault, that it’s just the luck of the draw, we immediately disempower her. With those four words, ‘it’s not your fault,’ while passively reassuring, the postscript is, ‘and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

Rug pulled. Agency removed. The End.

Telling a woman that a disease created by her own biology is just bad luck? It’s a short and shotty rope bridge to telling her she has no choice in how and when to birth children.

What a medical professional is attempting to encourage here is a release from culpability, and thus responsibility, for their patient. Out of a (misguided) sense of compassion, they believe absolving the diseased individual of having played any part in their failures of their body in turn brings that same individual some sort of emotional relief—a relief from the pressure to having to do much about it.

It’s equivalent to: ‘you had nothing to do with getting sick and so you have nothing to do with getting healthy.’

I also heard these words, on several occasions and from just as many health professionals. I’ve even been told, to my grief-stricken face, ‘I just don’t want my patients to feel like they bear any responsibility for their treatment.’ These words incensed me then and they completely annihilate my patience now.

Cancer is not a car crash. It’s not a vehicle out of another human’s control that crosses one’s path with only time and place to blame.

The intimation with these words is also that because cancer develops only for those less fortunate, that fortune then ultimately dictates if that person dies from it. If it’s only a matter of luck, then are all these surgeries, pharmaceuticals, various ‘treatment lines’ just rolls of the dice? If you actualy ask a conventional oncologist this question, which I have, they’ll sheepishly admit (though through highly trained medical-ese), that there’s just too much they still don’t know about how cancer actually works.

I call bullshit. But that’s another essay.

So, for the here and now, let me get this straight. If we don’t fully understand the cause of a thing, and no one’s ‘at fault,’ then that thing can ostensibly be slung in the same net as say… paranormal fucking activity?

Bodily autonomy – the ability to make choices about one’s own body without coercion or external influence – is a fundamental human right. It’s also systemically under siege.

From reproductive health to disability neglect and violence, gender identity to a disease that will change the lives of over 300,000 women this year in the United States alone, the threats are real and they are insidious.

Do I believe these physicians are intentionally denying their patients agency over their bodies and thus their health? No. In my personal experience, extremely unlikely. But as my new friend explained to me when expressing her own exasperation over having been told of her bad luck, while she couldn’t quite put her finger on why, it both crushed and infuriated her.

Even if there isn’t singular causality to point to, instead of removing the woman from her own bodily equation, can we instead reiterate her very essential human right to control what she does with it?

Women don’t intentionally choose to develop breast cancer. But they also aren’t given all the information they need to choose not to develop it in the first place.

So guess what. It’s all our faults, and we’re all responsible for fixing it. If my six year-old can say, with absolute conviction, ‘my body, my rules,’ we can too.

We can say it, we can vote it, we can encourage it and we can trust it.