Hi I’m 42, have young children, and was diagnosed with bc in Feb. I’ve just finished my cancer treatment, 8 gruelling months of chemo, surgery, rads, and more risk-reducing surgery at the end. I am doing fine physically and mentally but I know I’m only fresh after the end of treatment and don’t know what to expect once a more normal life resumes. I would like to think that I will be a stronger person as a result of what has happened, just so that I can take something positive from this life-threatening situation. But I also think that this experience can potentially make people feel more vulnerable and weaker than before. I am interested to know your experiences and whether there are strategies to try to manipulate our mind to make us believe that we’re now stronger.
Hi Barbwill,
I am 4 months finished treatment, only the dreaded tamoxifen now! I was a pretty strong person prior to diagnosis, I feel as though I am a calmer person now, I take things to do with others in my stride where as unfortunately with myself I do feel on the brink of panic at times!! I still have fears harbouring in my head. Will I conquer that, hope so! it’s still early days. I do know that I’m not “me” any longer and I will have to get to know the new “me” a little better before I can answer your question…take care xx
Hi Barbwill
I am 18 mths post active treatment for grade two cancer. I had a mastectomy, node clearance, chemo and am on tamoxifin for three and a half more years.
I am 39 and also have young children. They were only 5 and 18mths at the age of diagnosis two years ago.
I often wonder if i would have managed to deal with the whole experience without them. Whether it was they who made me strong throughout.
I am now undergoing recon for the second time, and it is hard! I am desperate for it to be over, to have two breasts that i can live with and to move on.
Some days i have the most awful thoughts swimming in my head, and other days, i can forget and be ‘normal’.
I do feel slightly more vulnerable at times to be honest, but other days, i feel i can take on the world.
Life will never be the same as it was, the innocence has gone, and the fear is there. Whether i an a stronger person now , i do not know.
Naz
Hi Barbwill
Currently on TAX and thinking that the third one might kill me if the second was anything to go by 
But seriously, I was diagnosed stage IV in June after a routine mammogram (I’m 49) with mets to spine lung and liver. No lumps or bumps to warn me, no family history, not overweight, little alcohol, vegetarian…
What I’ve learned on the journey so far is that my body can take pretty much everything that they throw at it but it’s my mind that completely screws up everything. The ‘what ifs’; my kids are 11 & 14 and I really want to know the smart, funny, adults they will be but statistically, it’s unlikely I’ll make it. (Except I don’t do statistics…)
Mostly I try to live in the moment and have started meditating and refusing to do the whole “what if I’m not there for his/her wedding” etc. Statistically of course, I have the same chance of being hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow - as everyone else has.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly strong person. I don’t feel I need to be strong, just to keep doing what I’m doing and not to sweat the small stuff. Once you’re in the BC boat, I guess you just have to pick up that oar and paddle!
Laurie x
Hi Barbwill, I finished trearment in June and feel almost back to normal apart from tiredness and the odd wobbly. I’ve always been pretty positive and that works for me.I’ll probably worry when it’s almost time for next mammogram but am determined to live my life as normally as possible.
Margaret
Im 4 years post DX, now 49, and moving positively in the right direction…most of the time.
I remember at DX asking “Do you fix heads?”. He didn’t answer. My surgeon at the time actually said to me “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I hadn’t weighed him up at the time, and wonder if he saw the invisable bubble above my head saying, “*#?@ off you silly man”. 4 years on…he was right. Not a day goes past when I dont think about cancer although I believe my prognosis is good, but other things take over and it does get pushed down the pecking order of thoughts.
I visualised my screaming cancer voices as a monkey sitting on my shoulder, screaming neg thoughts in my ear. I’ve posted this previously, but actually bought a knitting kit for my daughter by chance and she couldn’t do it. I started knitting it for her and it turned into this monkey. He now sits quietly, most of the time. My girl used to take the monkey to bed, he now sits on her wardrobe.
I went back to quite a stressful job exactly 5 months post DX (a bit early in hindsightas I really was not very robust at the time, but was pressured to go back). I look around me sometimes at the fuss going on, and think nothing can touch me like the time you are told you have a potentially fatal desease. I can now step back from things around me… but oh my cancer monkey can start squarking again each time a mamo comes around.
Naz summed it up so well.
Love and empathy
Blessing
I do not believe the phrase in the OP.
I’ve gone through some real sh*t in my life previously.
One example: My ex-OH left me unable to trust again. Fourteen years into a new relationship and only now am I starting to believe that men can be faithful.
After the BC Dx and treatment, I am left ever-fearful. I don’t want to be like this - I am normally a glass half-full person but this is too big, too much.
No, I’m not stronger. The readiness of tears proves that.
Here is a borrowed analogy for you:
Take a piece of paper and crumple it up, stamp on it with your shoes and really mess it up but do not rip it.
Then unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty is is. Tell it that you are sorry.
Now look at all the scars left behind. Those scars will never go away no matter how hard you try to forget or try to straighten and clean it up.
That is what happens when you suffer trauma; I believe that some scars are there forever, even if they are on your internal piece of paper that you choose not to think about.
Ninja,
Think that analogy sums it up completely! xx
Great analogy ninja
can i steal it 
Melxx
Of course, Pet. I stole it (and changed it quite a bit) from an anti-bullying thing for children.
It also applies for spousal and workplace bullying; it’s not just kids who get bullied.
Edit: will this be flying round Facebook now? Hee hee. That’s where I stole it from before I changed it.
Ninja, I also think that the scars never go away, but whether such an experience makes people able to laugh at the small things that are perceived as big problems by people who haven’t been affected by something this serious - or whether it makes us feel more vulnerable is not clear to me. A month since the end of rads I am feeling pretty vulnerable and still quite wobbly, both physically and mentally. And I feel that I am sinking back into a mode of thinking where small things get at me as much as they used to. The ultimate test will be when I will go back to work in the new year. I put my heart and soul in everything I do but this is the reason why I get so upset when things don’t pay off. I hope I will be able to use this bad experience to maintain a more healthy perspective on things, I don’t know if I will be though.
I prefer
You never know how strong you are, until being strong is the only choice you have
I think we’re all different - the thread title will be true for some. For me, I have been nearly killed once before, in a car crash, and had a triple bereavement to cope with as well. The cancer journey (40 years later) was hard, but I had inner strength to grit teeth and get through it, because those “muscles” were already well developed. Being gentle with self now, post treatment, is a task with weaker muscles, so I’ll have to work on it… so you could use a different analogy - that we have emotional/spiritual muscles which get stronger with use, just as our physical muscles do. Ninja, your trust tendon was torn/ruptured - and I wouldn’t want to minimise that injury - takes a lot of healing… Jane
Jane - my ‘trust tendon’ was ruptured in toddlerhood.
But that’s another story; one that kept repeating itself :o(
Ninja, I am so sorry to read that you’ve had some much hardship in your life even before BC. I guess that injury inflicted by other human beings has a different nature compared to cancer. At least no one is responsible for our cancer, no one has caused it, we were just unlucky …
I feel that other hard things I had to contend with in the past and that were just back luck rather than caused by someone have shown me, as lizzyship says, that I am stronger than I thought. Whether I will be able to hang on to this thought when people and situations will make me feel inadequate in tiny easy insignificant things … we’ll see …
So sorry ninja - that shouldn’t happen to anyone 
definitely doesn’t make you stronger, just scars you very deeply. Hugs… Jane
Lizzy
I think that phrase sums it up perfectly. We all cope, with whatever life throws at us, in whichever way works for us. We are all different, and no two experiences of BC are the same and no two people react the same way. We are shaped by our previous life experiences, positive or negative. Survival is the ultimate goal and it doesn’t matter how you get there.
Hi barbwill, well your name suggests a lot:)
I’m nearly 2 months past a mx,chemo then rads and just starting to get glimpses of normality as it will be in the future as its never going to be the same again and futile to expect that.
I have low moments and they consume me at that moment but there are mornings when I wake and it’s the second thing I think of.
It’s diff for us all but still I believe there’s a process we go through before we can start to begin to shape a different future fo ourselves whatever that may be.
Take care all you fine women ouut there!