My daughters were three and five-years-old when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 at the age of the 32. For me, one of the scariest parts of my diagnosis with breast cancer was the challenge of keeping life as normal as possible for those little girls. How would I explain things so that they would understand the idea of cancer, but not be overly fearful? How would they react to the physical changes I would go through? How would their day-to-day lives change as I went from being completely available to them to being unable to pick them up? How would I control my own fear of this big, awful unknown so as not to project that fear onto them?
But as kids so often do, my girls surprised me by what they picked up and absorbed from my experience. Rather than fear my chemo-induced bald head, my three year old was known to shout, “Hey, Baldy!” at random bald strangers because they looked just like Mommy (even if most of them happened to be middle-aged, “hair-challenged” men). My five year old wanted to make care packages for the kids with cancer going through radiation that her Dad helped as a part of his job as an anesthesiologist.
The girls came to know my doctors as part of our “team.” They knew that Dr. Nathalie was going to take the cancer out, and Dr. Shannon was going to make new breasts for Mommy. One night before bed, my five year old looked at me with a very serious expression on her face and said, “Mommy, I have a question.” Thinking that she was going to ask me some deep question about my cancer diagnosis or share the fear she was likely experiencing, I braced myself. “Can boys be surgeons, too?” she asked.