Preventing cancer while supporting those who have it
I was diagnosed with invasive ductal breast cancer in 2009 at the age of 52, when both my children were teenagers. I had three surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation while trying to maintain my career as an attorney at a small housing and community development law firm in Oakland. In 2013, I lived through a possible metastatic recurrence, which turned out to be a “false alarm” (false medically, not spiritually!), and in 2014, I left my job of 31 years, ostensibly to seek a healthier work/life balance.
I began training and working as a breast cancer prevention advocate, focusing on the environmental causes of breast cancer and chemical regulation. With other breast cancer survivors concerned about the next generation, I co-founded Breast Cancer Over Time, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting scientific research into breast cancer prevention. I serve as executive director, leading a weekly support group and advocating for change in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
Together with scientists from the CPMC Research Institute, we received grants from the California Breast Cancer Research Program (using tobacco tax monies) for a community-based participatory research study. Our goal was to investigate the impact of estrogenic chemicals found in cosmetics on normal human breast cells donated by women who have never had cancer. This resulted in a published scientific article that shows an increased breast cancer risk in women who use cosmetics that contain xenoestrogens such as parabens and phthalates.
As the community principal investigator in that study, I recruited and held the hands of more than 50 women while they donated breast cells through fine-needle aspiration. In the process, I heard stories about the mothers, aunts, cousins, grandmas, and friends they had lost to breast cancer and their fears that they would be next.
When I heard about a training at Commonweal on how to host a healing circle, I applied, thinking it would help me be a better listener and organizer in this work. I attended one glorious in-person training session, and then the COVID lockdown began. I completed my training online with Healing Circles Global, joined two Living with Cancer (LWC) circles while training, and went on to start and co-host a new circle in 2021. I now co-host three circles and have served on the LWC leadership team since 2022.
Healing circles have changed my life. They’ve taught me the essential truth that we heal in community. In the past year, I’ve been in circles with people who are newly diagnosed, who are in treatment, whose cancer has recurred, who are dying, and who have since passed, and they’ve given me a big dose of perspective, along with shared love, joy, and sorrow.
Today’s many crises – environmental, political, social, intellectual, the devastating wars – are overwhelming. I’m done with competition, bureaucratic stupidity, divisive politics, and feeling that I, personally, must constantly struggle to change the world. Through healing circles, I’ve turned toward loving kindness, witnessing and accompanying, compassion and self-compassion, the reading of poems and the holding of hands, all of which I can do in a more intimate world, albeit one that reaches around the globe. I help others and myself to heal, and in doing so, still work to change the world.
Header photo: Polly, Pumpkin, and Emilia
