This is my first time posting on anything like this. I wonder if anyone can offer some help or advice.
I’m really struggling with my relationship with my family following my experience of breast cancer. It’s such an added source of pain and anguish to not be getting on well with them after coming through such a difficult and frightening period.
I was diagnosed with stage 2 TNBC last year. I’m in my 30s so it was a huge shock. Treatment was obviously brutal, exhausting, almost unsurvivable. I remember at one point thinking that if I had to go through this again I’d probably just rather die.
After 12 weeks of pacli/carbo and then 8 weeks of EC I was absolutely on my knees, almost unable to function - I was sick, hallucinating, you name it. One week after my last chemo IV my sister told me she was pregnant and my reaction was kind of neutral - not hugely excited or expressing the joy she clearly expected. I was too sick to feel any happiness at that point in my life. I was also convinced that I would probably be dead in the next few years and would never see the baby grow up. I said congratulations but she was clearly very disappointed that I wasn’t jumping for joy.
For a period of about 6 weeks after this I retreated from my family. I needed some time to recover from the absolute trauma of chemotherapy so after my initial neutral response, I wasn’t really in contact with my sister during this period of her pregnancy. But then after 6 weeks I found that I had the strength to start handling things again and I got in touch with her to try to see her and smooth things over. I knew I had hurt her feelings and I wanted to sort things out.
The following months involved me reaching out to her over and over and over again in an attempt to see her, and her pretty much ignoring me completely. I apologised twice (in writing since she refused to see me). The only time she did agree to see me (which came after a couple of months of being totally ignored) she shouted at me in a public place. I’ve never seen her that angry, she was like some kind of wild animal.
And the problem is that during this period when she was point blank refusing to speak to me and/or shouting at me in public because I had wronged her so much, I was still in cancer treatment. She didn’t try to see me after my surgery, she completely ignored me through 20 rounds of radiotherapy. She didn’t message me on the last day of treatment. She just checked out completely from my life and treatment which was incredibly painful.
It’s now 6 months later and despite my huge effort things are still not repaired and I fear they never will be now. I understand that my parents are in an impossible position, but their continuing attempts to be neutral and suggest that there are “two side to this story” are driving me crazy. In doing so, I feel my whole family is drawing a comparison between pregnancy and cancer, as if they are experiences of equal difficulty which should be treated as if they are the same.
But I feel that pregnancy and cancer are not equivalent. One is not like the other. I think that she was acting in an unreasonable way at a time when I was facing a year-long near death experience and no one has confronted her with that fact. I have had to explain this to my parents over and over and over again, and the effort of doing so is almost breaking me in two. It is an acutely traumatic experience to have to outline to your family the reasons why having cancer is hard and might have an impact on your capacity to deal with life, but they just don’t seem to get it. For the benefit of the family I have put these feelings aside and made countless efforts to reconcile with her, none of which have been met with any success. I now feel unable to make any further efforts as the act of silencing myself and my own feelings is causing me so much pain that I think it is ultimately counterproductive.
My parents think I should speak to her and explain how I feel but even the act of doing this is, again, opening myself up for the trauma of having to persuade the people close to me that cancer is difficult which they just don’t seem to see. My boyfriend is so angry with the way they are treating me that we are planning to move away. Although this will help in the short term, it’s very painful in the long term to feel like I’ve lost all my family at a time when i’m still only a couple of months out of treatment. I would have hoped this time would be one in which I could rely on them but instead I’ve lost them all. I feel abandoned at a time of great pain and vulnerability and don’t know what to do to move forward. The other day I even had an intrusive thought along the lines of - “what was the point of going through all that effort to stay alive if this is what I’m left with, perhaps it would have been better if I had just died”. That thought was very frightening but is a sign of just how hopeless I feel that things will getter. I just can’t see a way forward.