From Diagnosis to Recovery: Building a Breast Cancer Support System

“With acceptance that I had breast cancer, came skyrocketing levels of anxiety, depression and fear. I kept picturing the first “Alien” movie released in 1979. Directed by Ridley Scott, we saw it senior year in college at an upstate New York movie theater. On the way back to earth, the spaceship Nostromo gets a distress call from a distant moon They land and explore a ship, finding a storage room filled with eggs. One hatches and lands on an astronaut’s face. The creature detaches itself on its own and dies. Later in the movie, the alien eats its way out of the astronauts’ chest in a scene that had the entire theater screaming.

Cancer was that alien to me, and I pictured it growing inside my breasts, gnawing its way towards my organs, never satisfied that it had gotten enough. The image of cancer wanting to take over my entire body would not leave me, and I knew I needed to . . .”

https://www.nextavenue.org/building-a-breast-cancer-support-system