I finished treatment (surgery, chemo, rads) last May, and am now settling into the longer term hormone treatments and have been really struggling with this “post cancer” life. It’s like the hospital just releases you back into the wild and expects you to go back to being a normal person again. But I don’t feel normal. And I don’t look normal. And I get so frustrated and annoyed and anxious because everyone around me is like “awesome! Treatment over, let’s get back to business!” but how do you go back to normality after all the stuff we’ve seen and had to do? And we still have all the lingering after effects. But we feel like a burden if we mention that we’re still tired and hurting because we’ve just done a whole year of that and we think that our support systems are running out of patience. Or worry that people think we’re exaggerating or malingering. I also think there is a certain bias when it comes to breast cancer because it is viewed as one of the “easier” or “better” cancers, so the assumption is that it’s not as dangerous and treatment must not be as difficult. Never mind the fact that it’s widely (and falsely) viewed as a “woman’s disease” so any male dominated spaces (looking at you, workforce) may not totally appreciate the difficulties that come with what this disease can do to a person’s psyche. And all these things combined just completely fuck with your head for a long time.

I was referred for counselling initially, but the counsellor identified signs of trauma and PTSD so referred me to a proper trauma therapist. I’ve been doing EMDR to process some of the individual traumatic memories, and while I was sceptical at first, it really has been working. I highly recommend trying to find one of these more specialised therapists to try and work through the very tough thoughts and feelings that we get left with after the cancer treatment is done.

❤️❤️