When someone is given a diagnosis of breast cancer, your life is changed forever. The focus becomes doctors’ appointments, testing, assessments and decisions about everything from the cancer treatment to how to handle everything else in your life. There is absolutely no time or consideration regarding anything outside of the immediate choices that have to be made and more than likely some significant changes in your lifestyle. Therefore, any plans for just about anything else in life are placed on the back burner.“No matter what that cancer diagnosis might be and/or what the prognosis is, your dreams become more important than ever.”
Barbara Jacoby
This is fine as long as those hopes and dreams and goals are only moved temporarily and not permanently discarded. But, even beyond that, just because you have come to a fork in the road where you have to deal with the cancer that doesn’t mean that other things are lost forever. In fact that is the last thing that should happen.
No matter who you are, where you have been and what you may have accomplished in your life, it you don’t have other dreams that you want to pursue or new goals to reach, you will have no incentive or reason to get out of bed in the morning. You will view your life as having done it all and therefore you will just sit back and watch the rest of the world go by. Facing a cancer diagnosis without special goals and dreams to reach may leave you without any incentive.
Just ask anyone whom you know who has had breast cancer! It may be that the dream is to watch the children grow up and go to college and get married and have time to meet the grandchildren. Perhaps a career change has always been what you have wanted to do. Maybe you have always wanted to move to another part of the country or the world in order to be closer to family or enjoy your favorite mountains or lakes on a full-time basis. You just might have always wanted to spend your time hitting every karaoke bar within a seven-county range so that you could socialize with your friends and sing your heart out.
No matter what that cancer diagnosis might be and/or what the prognosis is, your dreams become more important than ever. It takes the focus from the medical and allows you to muse about what you are going to tackle first after the current round of chemo has been completed. It allows for you to think of all of the things you want to do and make an actual plan to move forward as soon as you don’t have to go to the doctor appointments every week or so. And if you don’t know what it is that you would like to do when you have that extra personal time back, you can think about it and really give it the attention that is needed to conceiving a path to follow that puts a smile on your face just thinking about it.
If we are able to do something like that, we will move through our treatment and recovery with ease and speed with the knowledge that when we finish, or reach some point where we allow for it, we will be taking our first steps toward achieving our dreams. I promise you that nothing can compare with the hope for the future and the achievement of something that lives in your heart. It makes all of the difference in the world.
Barbara Jacoby is an award winning blogger that has contributed her writings to multiple online publications that have touched readers worldwide.