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It s a bad feeling, looking at yourself and seeing that portion of your body gone,” Alice recalled. “It’s worse for the husband.” she added.
Support from a husband plays a major role in a wife’s recovery from a mastectomy. Ellen described her partner’s reaction as “absolutely wonderful.”
She remembered being invited to attend group therapy sessions to help her adjust to the aftermath of cancer. “1 asked my husband if he thought I needed to go and he said ‘If you get any more adjusted, 1 don’t know what I’ll do,’ " Ellen recalled with a chuckle.
"The worst part of it’s not the operation. The worst part is the emotional upset—the fact that you know you had cancer, said Alice. “You ask youself. "Did they get it all? Will it re-occur? Will I be so disfigured that people will notice one breast is different from the other? Will people be afraid of me because I've had cancer?”
Alice, whose operation occurred over a decade earlier than Ellen's, noticed a change in some of her friends after they’d found out that she had cancer. “Some people are afraid of cancer patients as though they had leprosy. There's no need for that. It’s not contagious,” she stressed.
Ten years later, Ellen’s friends displayed more understanding.
"Nobody treated me the slightest bit different,” said Ellen, recalling that she’d joined her regular bridge club for play just a week after returning home from the hospital. “I told them I’d had cancer, that I'd had a mastectomy and that I didn’t mind talking about it so if they had any questions, to ask."
Alice immediately returned to her job as a school teacher after her operation. Her coworkers. unlike some of her friends and acquainteances were marvelous. "They didn’t treat me any differently,” she recalled.
She’s angered by the job discrimination many cancer patients encounter when they try to return to work.
“There’s no reason why a person can’t work just the same after their operation. In fact, it's the best therapy possible. If you can’t work, if you're incapacitated, you need to find something to do."
She also stressed the importance of physical
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