Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,12

Her laughter is like a song, and it’s so contagious that I start laughing too.

We both sit there laughing, her at the sanctimonious woman, and me at my mistake—at the ways in which our minds betray us as much as our bodies do.

Julie discovered her cancer while having sex with her husband on a beach in Tahiti. She didn’t suspect it was cancer, though. Her breast felt tender, and later, in the shower, the tender spot felt funky, but often she had areas that felt funky and her gynecologist always found them to be glands that changed size at certain times of the month. Anyway, she thought, maybe she was pregnant. She and her new husband, Matt, had been together for three years and both had talked about wanting to start a family as soon as they got married. In the weeks before the wedding, they hadn’t been vigilant about birth control.

It was a good time to have a baby too. Julie had just gotten tenure at her university, and after years of hard work, she could finally take a breath. Now there would be more time for her passions: running marathons and climbing mountains and baking silly cakes for her nephew. There would also be time for marriage and parenthood.

When Julie got back from her honeymoon, she peed on a stick and showed it to Matt, who picked her up and danced around the room with her. They decided that the song that happened to be on the radio—“Walking on Sunshine”—would be their baby’s theme song. Excited, they went to the obstetrician for their first prenatal appointment, and when her doctor felt the “gland” that Julie had noticed on her honeymoon, his smile faded slightly.

“It’s probably nothing,” he said, “but let’s get it checked out.”

It wasn’t nothing. Young, newly married, and pregnant, with no family history of breast cancer, Julie had been struck by the randomness of the universe. Then, while grappling with how to handle the cancer treatment and the pregnancy, she had a miscarriage.

This was when Julie landed in my office.

It was an odd referral, given that I wasn’t a therapist who specialized in treating people with cancer. But my lack of expertise was exactly why Julie wanted to see me. She had told her physician that she didn’t want a therapist from “the cancer team.” She wanted to feel normal, to be part of the living. And since her doctors seemed confident that she’d be fine after surgery and chemo, she wanted to focus on both getting through the treatment and being newly married. (What should she say in her wedding-gift thank-you notes? Thanks so much for the lovely bowl . . . I keep it by my bed to vomit in?)

The treatment was brutal but Julie got better. The day after her doctors declared her “tumor-free,” she and Matt went on a hot-air balloon ride with their closest friends and family. It was the first week of summer, and as they joined arms and watched the sunset from a thousand feet above the earth, Julie no longer felt cheated, as she had during the treatment, but lucky. Yes, she’d gone through hell. But it was behind her, and her future lay ahead. In six months, she would get a final scan, a sign-off, to clear her for pregnancy. That night, she dreamed that she was in her sixties and holding her first grandchild.

Julie was in good spirits. Our work was done.

I didn’t see Julie between the hot-air balloon ride and the scan. But I did start getting calls from other cancer patients who’d been referred by Julie’s oncologist. There’s nothing like illness to take away a sense of control, even if we often have less of it than we imagine. What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick. And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should. I’d let Julie do it her way—I was so inexperienced that I didn’t have a strong sense of what a “way” should look like—and it seemed to help.

“Whatever you did with her,” Julie’s oncologist said, “she seemed pleased with the outcome.”

I knew that I hadn’t done anything brilliant with Julie. Mostly, I worked hard not to flinch from her rawness. But that rawness went only so far because we weren’t even thinking about