Community Blog
March 2, 2008
| Dream On | Views: 445 |
This was on the John Hopkins web-site. I am sure we all have dreams one time or another.
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I had an unusual dream last night I thought I’d share with you. I dreamt I had been taken to court before a judge and jury. Well, actually, my breast cancer was taken to court.
The judge declared that my breast was being charged with illegally harboring breast cancer inside it. This was not only unlawful but was also a federal offense to my body. The jury was then given details about the “extent of the offense.”
They reviewed my biopsy and the subsequent pathology report from my mastectomy surgery. The seriousness of the offense was determined by the prognostic factors: tumor size, stage, hormone receptors, HER2neu receptors, and grade of the cancer cells. My “sentence” was my actual treatment plan (based on evidence-based medicine, of course).
I was then packed off to jail and housed in a special ward for “breast cancer offenders,” where I served my sentence (i.e., treatment). Most of the women there were doing six to nine months, which is, of course, the length of most treatment plans from surgery to chemo to radiation. Other unfortunates were on death row with stage 4 metastatic disease.
Reflecting on this dream the next morning, I realized it had probably been triggered by a discussion I had with a newly diagnosed patient the day before. She had said to me, “I feel like I’m being punished for something but I don’t know what I did wrong to get this breast cancer.”
The chances that a woman purposefully did something to trigger or promote her disease are slim. We need to encourage newly diagnosed patients to look at their situation differently. Call it bad luck or fate. Gee, some even call it an opportunity – for example, you might get a free tummy tuck as part of the breast cancer reconstruction process. Or you can emerge from treatment with a new vision of how you’d like to spend the rest of your life.
Have you had dreams related to your breast cancer diagnosis or treatment? Tell us about them.
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Talking about dreams, oh you can’t imagine my summer of “dreams”. I thought they were dreams but after 20 days of hospitalization when my doctor decided to take me off the morphine and fentanyl after I could hold nothing on my stomach for a few days due to a simple kidney infection. Those antibotics are horse pills. Well let me tell you, I thought I was in a hot air balloon shaped like a cloud in the basket tuning instruments for my son’s orchestra class so they could drop from the cloud in Holland and play at Sean Lennon’s concert. For some reason the children being resilant and all would not hurt as they dropped in to play the concert. That is the tip of the iceburg and I believe my mind shifted to a point I could stand as the pain was so intense I didn’t eat nor sleep for about 20 pounds. But I trully believe God gave me that reprieve and I know with all my heart that I must be here for some reason and God is not angry or those so believable manifestations would have been scary or hurt me in some way. Instead it just scared the doctors. I had to find out on my own afterwards that it was side effects of being pulled off of opiates drastically after taking them regularly for 3 years. I would love to publish a book of the rest of the story. It was a comfort in some odd way to be busy and a upstanding dream in the seperate reality. sharron
Hi gal . Yes you should write about your Dreams, Just like the one I posted, There is always a magazine that would love to hear about what people go through when they are fighting a battle. How they cope, with things that are going on in their body.
So please if any one has a story, you think people should hear, by all means give it a try.
Check Magazines on the net, they are always looking for stories.
Hugs Sherri