Did worrying cause my cancer?

A tale of magical thinking

At least several times a day, I wonder what I did to cause my cancer. I would like to believe that it just happened to me, or like my doctors say, it’s bad luck, some bad cells went haywire. The problem is I can’t seem to buy this theory when there is just too much I can blame myself for. Some of what I blame myself for was action-oriented, some was negligence, and some was just my thinking.

When I speak to women about their diagnosis, a fair amount mention that they were blindsided. I wasn’t at all. On the contrary, I was expecting it. Before my diagnosis, I was obsessed with the possibility of developing breast cancer after pregnancy. It started many years ago, when I turned 18, my best friend’s mother passed from cancer. She was diagnosed with cancer shortly after her fourth daughter was born, and I remember, at that age, feeling terrified that after having a baby, I would be diagnosed with breast cancer. I should be worried about this.

It was the beginning of my preoccupation with cancer awareness. It always felt like it was coming for me, but I don’t know why. Maybe many of us feel this way.

At my six week check up, after my daughter was born, I spoke to my OB about my concern. She took me seriously even though there was no genetic or familial reason to, and suggested that I start getting mammograms as soon as I was ready. I spoke to my GP who said it was unlikely and that there was no association with pregnancy and cancer. I spoke to my psychologist about it when I started experiencing intrusive thoughts in the form of breast cancer.

I might argue that I willed it into existence. Or was it an intuitive knowing? One of many questions that I’ll never be able to answer.

This is, after all, magical thinking. Defined by the idea that our thoughts and beliefs can influence or cause events in the real world, it’s clear that cancer is a great opportunity for me to apply a retrospective assignment of seemingly causal events.

One of those “past life” pictures where you look at pictures before your diagnosis and you just feel like you don’t recognize this person at all. It feels like looking at someone else.

Whatever the case, the upside of being hyperaware is that it caused me to develop the habit of checking my breasts often, and eventually flagging a subtle change in the texture of my left breast tissue.

It’s also strange to admit that when I was diagnosed, I felt a strange sense of relief. Since my worst fear was realized, I no longer had to live in fear of it happening one day. It was here, and now, and I was dealing- I didn’t stop functioning the way I always suspected I would. On the contrary, I was brave.

Or maybe the relief stemmed from learning that I wasn’t crazy for always worrying about it, rather just really intuitive.

In addition to willing my cancer in to existence - a lot of my behavioral faults keep me up at night. Stress, lack of exercise, bad eating and drinking habits, more stress… I feel inclined to expand on these habits in a confessional style- but not because I really think they are the cause. More because I believe that if I have hundreds of reasons that I hoard and blame myself for, I suspect others do, too.

Maybe it would feel helpful to know that it’s normal to blame yourself. And maybe just because we blame ourselves doesn’t make it true.

Does that sound crazy? Or just really intuitive…

Yours truly,

Marcella