Breast Cancer Journey to Healing

by Sue Pearson

He was an impish leprechaun who delighted in turning bad news into good. “Something just told me to go back and take another look.” The radiologist smiled at me with a playful look, proud of the gift he had for finding small cancers that other radiologists had overlooked. There was no guile in him, more like glee to deliver the news that the cancer he found was early and treatable. That’s what he told me about finding my breast cancer. He was looking at the mammogram I had just gotten a few days before, and he didn’t see anything suspicious…at first. But when that feeling came over him to look again, he saw a little something, maybe nothing at all. He put my last three annual mammograms up on his screen, and that’s when he knew he was right to take another look. There was something there in the newest image that wasn’t there before.

I wasn’t shocked when the biopsy that followed indicated invasive lobular carcinoma. Twelve years earlier, I had been diagnosed with lobular carcinoma in situ (LCIS) in that same right breast. LCIS is not considered an actual cancer but a sign of increased risk. I took an estrogen-blocking drug those intervening years to try and lower my risk. I guess it worked for more than a decade, but now I was dealing with the real thing. There are two kinds of breast cancer – ductal, which accounts for about 90% of cases, and lobular, the more rare 10%.

My breast cancer surgeon thought she could remove the cancer with a simple lumpectomy, which conserves the breast. Still, she cautioned that lobular breast cancer doesn’t present as a lump. It is threadlike and can send tendrils out in many directions. She also said it is the trickiest cancer to detect early because it doesn’t show itself readily on mammograms. Even so, I thought my radiologist might have saved me the tricky part because of that “feeling” he had to look again.

My confidence was shattered when my surgeon called me a week after the lumpectomy to share the pathology report. Although the sentinel lymph node she removed did not show any cancer cells, the lobular cancer was not totally excised from the breast. She removed a lot of the tendrils, but the margins were not clear. She told me the only way to get rid of it was a mastectomy and said I might want to consider having both breasts removed, even though the left breast showed no sign of cancer. It took me a minute to absorb the idea I would lose a breast, but in my mind, this was the only option for beating cancer. I told my surgeon I would think about having both breasts removed.

I went back and forth on the double vs. the single mastectomy. I asked for divine guidance but wasn’t sensing any messages. Then I spoke with my good friend Sue on the phone. I filled her in on what was happening and, as always, she was very supportive. She understood the dilemma of keeping one breast intact but also the risk of cancer developing in that remaining breast. We ended that phone call with a virtual hug across the miles, but within seconds she texted me back. “Hope you have your sense of humor intact. Here’s the thing – I’ve never known a woman to pass up a 2fer deal!” I laughed. I also had this wonderful warmth close over me and a feeling of peace. Divine guidance comes in many ways, and this was mine, delivered playfully but powerfully by my dear friend. I would opt for the two-for-one deal. I called my surgeon and told her I wanted a double mastectomy because I didn’t want to risk cancer showing up in the future in the left breast. I also knew that I wanted breast reconstruction, and the best result aesthetically would come from rebuilding both breasts at the same time.

My spiritually sensitive friend, Maridel, knew I wanted to explore the deeper issue of why I had developed breast cancer. It is my belief and hers that nothing happens outside of ourselves, and that mind and body are closely connected. She said it often helps to come up with a word to associate with the situation. Since breasts have the job of expressing milk to nourish babies, Maridel thought I might try on the word “expressing” as a tool to get to the truth. I thought there might be something to this approach but didn’t know how it fit with my personal story.

A week before the surgery was scheduled, another friend of mine, Sharon, emailed me a link to a free online healing workshop. She had heard this particular healer speak and thought she was good. There were five 30-minute sessions offered, one each day, Monday through Friday. Since it was free and the notion of healing appealed to me, I registered for the course. On day one, I listened as the healer explained most of us have some early trauma in our lives that remains unresolved and can lead to illness. Her voice was mesmerizing as she asked her participants to search their earliest memories from childhood, particularly up to age seven.

Eight years before this healing series, I had an extraordinary reading from a renowned astrologist. He shares his readings as a kind of life story, and as he told me mine, he captured the essence of my journey perfectly, except for one thing. He said I had a deeply repressed memory from childhood. He didn’t know what caused this but suggested sexual abuse could trigger something like this. I really didn’t think I had been molested as a child and couldn’t think of another trauma that might have happened to me.

Now sitting at my computer listening to the healer speak, I unearthed that trauma. When I was seven years old, my younger sister, Nancy, became suddenly unresponsive. I remember going with my mother to take her to the doctor, but illness to me meant maybe a bad cold or the flu. Two days after the doctor visit, Nancy lay on the sofa in the living room, very still and not responding to touch or voice. My mother was trying to get her to talk by asking what she had done at the park a few days before. Nancy remained silent. I didn’t really understand what was going on at the time, only that Nancy was not acting normally. I thought I could help ease my mother’s mind by telling her what Nancy and I had done at the park, so I began to describe our outing. My mother raised her voice and said to me, “Stop talking! I do not want you to talk. I want Nancy to talk.” I felt confused and upset that my mother would shut me down this way. After all, I was only trying to be helpful. An ambulance came to the house. My mother and father went with Nancy to the hospital. A short time later, two-year-old Nancy was dead. The pathology report would later reveal that Nancy died from spinal meningitis. Nancy had slipped into a coma at home, and that, of course, was why she was not talking.

I didn’t know anything about death, perhaps a bird or a cat had passed away, but not an actual much-loved human being. When my mother and father got home from the hospital, they sat down with my older sister, Margie, and me. I remember being shocked to see my father cry. My parents told us of Nancy’s death and said she had gone to heaven to be with God. She was never coming back. And this is when I made a mistake. Seven-year-old Susan thought, my mother told me not to talk, but I talked, and a short time later, my sister was dead. If I just hadn’t talked, Nancy would be alive. I caused my sister to die. Now, any adult or even an older child would not have made this conclusion. Young Susan concluded that she could not talk ever again and risk anyone else dying. And herein lies the repressed memory. I believed I had caused my sister’s death, so I stopped talking altogether. It was too dangerous, and I was a bad girl for having this terrifying power. I didn’t speak for an entire year. Expression was risky. My parents worried about me. I do remember them talking about taking me to a psychiatrist, but I don’t remember if they did. And I hadn’t remembered anything about my mistaken judgment until that first session with the online healer.

I felt a little dizzy and off-balance when I told my husband of this repressed memory. I felt as though I had been hypnotized by the healer’s voice. This must have been why I could delve so deeply into my psyche to uncover the repressed memory the astrologer had told me about almost a decade before.

The next day of the healing workshop, the healer gently suggested we focus on any childhood trauma we had mined the day before. She wanted us to relive it from the point of view of an observer. I was reluctant to revisit the day my sister, Nancy, died. The grief from this event had gripped my entire family most of our lives. But with the healer’s compassionate urging, I went back there. I saw Nancy motionless on the sofa. I saw my mother kneeling beside her on the floor, distraught that her youngest daughter was gravely ill. I saw myself next to my mother, thoroughly confused and desperate to make some sense of this scene. My sister and I had been running and laughing with abandon just a few days before at a local park. Now, as I replayed this memory, my throat began to tighten, my eyes welled with tears, my stomach in knots. I remembered the sheer terror of feeling I was responsible for my sister’s death. I silenced myself so no one else would die from this awful power I had unwittingly released. It was only a mistaken belief! I had repressed this memory for some 60 years because the pain of this belief was too difficult to bear. Now, as I confronted the truth that 7-year-old Sue had held herself a prisoner of a mistaken belief, I doubled over in real physical pain. That subconscious belief colored my entire life, causing me to feel unworthy and unlovable. I barely noticed when the online healer closed off the healing session with her loving words. I raced to the bathroom and threw up violently over and over again. Diarrhea gripped me as well; until from top to bottom, there was nothing more to purge. I felt terrible. If this was healing, then who needs it?

At the final healing session, the healer asked us to see ourselves as the young children who suffered trauma. She told me, the older, wiser Sue, to sit next to that 7-year-old Sue and put my arm around her as a friend; to ask the young Sue to tell me again what had happened. This time young Sue told older Sue, “I made a big mistake. I thought I killed my sister, but I had nothing to do with it. I wasted a lot of time feeling guilty and ashamed.” The healer told me to ask young Sue what she needed now. The answer brought a flood of tears again. Young Sue said, “I need to be forgiven for my mistaken belief.” Older, wiser Sue said through her tears, “I forgive you.” As I sobbed, I turned my attention to God and said, “OK, I unearthed the trauma, the repressed memory, and I have let it go, but why now? I am facing a double mastectomy in just a few days, and that’s enough stress without piling on these painful memories and undoing the mistakes.” I received God’s answer immediately. And I know it was from God because His answers are always surprising, unexpected, something I wouldn’t have thought of myself. And here it is: This memory and the cancer are all connected. You have done the hard part now, excising that judgment you made that wasn’t true. It’s gone. Poof! It disappeared. You can think of the surgery team as the clean-up crew.

My husband and I woke early on the day of my surgery. I was no longer tormented by facing the trauma in my childhood. I felt unburdened. As we drove to the hospital, I felt comforted by God’s message that I had “done the hard part.” My surgery team would just “clean up the remnants” from the message I had sent myself all those years ago that expression was dangerous, even deadly. In other words, my negative, damning, terrifying opinion of myself set up a situation in my body to interfere with expression. Since breast lobules are the seat of expression for the making of milk, breast cancer would be a likely place for those unexpressed, repressed, subconscious messages to gather and wreak havoc. Should I blame myself for getting cancer? I believe not. Blame and guilt would only compound the original mistake. Forgiveness is what is needed to undo the mistake and move on with loving, healing thoughts. This is but a beginning for me to understand the cause and effect relationship of negative, unloving, and repressed thoughts. As my husband navigated morning rush hour traffic on our way to the hospital, a digital sign on the south side of the freeway caught my eye. It read, “Worthy of every expression…”

Thank you, God, for this healing. I finally feel worthy of every expression.

The arrest of the mind’s extension is the cause of all illness, because only extension is the mind’s function. Block this, and you have blocked health… [CE T-8.VI.14:4-6]

Essentially, all healing is the release from fear. [CE T-2.VII.2:3]

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