Never say I didn’t bring you flowers
I was disabled, and she became my legs; over the years, as I grew sicker, I became more and more dependent on her care-giving and support. She always ran ahead of our lives to see whether I could handle the terrain—and I believed that she didn’t mind. I thought she...
‘I hate giving you bad news’
Danielle Hernandez is 30 and has Stage 4 breast cancer. As she calls her mother Violeta in Florida to deliver an update on her treatment from her home in Los Angeles, she oscillates between medical jargon and silver livings, with the more difficult pieces of...
My mother told me it would take 5 years to ‘get over’ her death. Here’s where I’m at a decade later.
The cruel irony of losing your mother is that right after her death is when you will need her the most. My mother died a decade ago, when she was 57 and I was 21. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 9, but, for the most part, she made a full...
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Voicemails seemed so archaic. And then his mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. And then she was gone. Listen to the episode on Invisibilia.
When The Caregiver Gets Sick
On Tuesday, November 14, 2017, I heard the words “You have breast cancer.” I knew the words were coming. Somehow, I just knew. I had had a routine mammogram the week before…a week and a half after I had noticed a lump. A lump that my doctor had NOT noticed 3...
My Brother’s Keeper
The hardest thing about marrying off my brother was trusting his new wife could care for his multiple sclerosis. I was five months into a new job when Mom asked if I could leave work early. There was finally news with Matt, and it was better discussed in person....
One In Three Women With Breast Cancer Treated Unnecessarily, Study Concludes
One in three women with breast cancer detected by a mammogram is treated unnecessarily, because screening tests found tumors that are so slow-growing that they’re essentially harmless, according to a Danish study published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine, which...
Socially Isolated Breast Cancer Patients Face Higher Recurrence and Mortality Rates
A new study found that more socially isolated breast cancer survivors had higher rates of recurrence and mortality, while women with larger social networks experienced better outcomes. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer...
The Death Of My Boyfriend’s Mother Gave Me Closure On The Death Of My Own Over A Decade Ago
The week between finding out about his mom’s aneurysm and my flight home was one of the longest weeks of my life. I tried to be as supportive as I could while I was on the other side of the world, but I blamed myself for being unable to get home. After taking my final...Caregiver Stories: Sarah LaFave of Lori’s Hands
Sarah LaFave writes about the love and care she and her mother exchanged when their family had to deal with breast cancer … when Sarah and her brother, Brett, were still children.
The List
She rode the hour-long bus from Seoul to the airport and met me in the airport, and then we rode the hour-long bus back in. She’d already had the biopsy, so we went in to talk to the doctor about the result of it. I wasn’t being irrational or anything I didn’t think....Top Posts
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