The Pitfalls of Watching TV After Diagnosis

One of the unexpected ways that a cancer diagnosis has changed my life is it’s sometimes dangerous territory to watch movies or television shows (and, to a lesser degree, read books) because they have this unnerving tendency to suddenly fling a cancer or breast cancer angle at me.

For instance, I put on silly old Queer Eye for the Straight Guy tonight, just to kill some time while I picked up the kids’ toys and generally tidied up. But the Straight Guy for this particular episode was a widower, a man who lost his wife to breast cancer just two years ago. The Fab Five were helping him “move past” his wife’s loss, to help him be a better father to his motherless kids (oh right, did I mention there were three kids involved, aged 6, 11, and 13? yeah that didn’t punch me in the gut).

I cried buckets watching the show. They would periodically show the wife’s photos and tell stories about how wonderful she was and play poignant piano music in the background, and I was just bawling. I wanted to know MORE. I wanted to know what stage was her cancer? When they said she died three years after her diagnosis, did that mean she had a recurrence? Was it in her lymph nodes? Did it metastacize? Did she have a mastectomy? Did she turn out to have either BRCA1 or BRCA2, and if so, does her family worry that the children will also be positive for the mutation? The Fab 5 were blithely ignoring my questions about her cancer and told me nothing more than she had cancer and died, but she was brave.

In the absence of facts, I immediately began picturing Tom and my boys in a me-less future, because that is what I doooooo. And then I cried more, because the thought of not growing old with Tom or seeing the boys grow up is beyond unbearable. I’m still all puffy and red-nosed now, and I might just have to dig out some Ativan if I ever want to get some sleep tonight.

Do I even need to mention that I didn’t get very far with the toy tidying?