by PinayWriter

Created on: November 13, 2008   Last Updated: December 25, 2008

Hand across for protection

My mother had breast cancer when I was in high school. I was afraid that she would die. She was in the hospital for a surgery. Luckily she did not need to get radiation therapy. But my mother still has some benign tumors in her breasts. But to a teenager from the Philippines, benign was a foreign word. The only word I understood was tumor. I knew it was bad. I understood cancer. I knew it was deadly. I knew what breasts meant. And I knew I had them too. I knew what breast cancer was. I knew it was the reason why my grandmother was not around. When my mother tells me about her it was always at those odd times in my life that shaped what kind of girl I would grow up to be. It was when I refused to wear dresses that my mother would say, "If your grandmother was alive she would make you such beautiful dresses that you would refuse to wear anything else." When she talked about her, it was always in connection to what she would have been had she not been taken away by her cancer. But the word "cancer" was not spoken frequently in our home. Somehow, it made everyone more uncomfortable than death did.

When I started wearing my training bra, my mother also reminded me not to touch my breasts too much. She told me that it would cause cancer if I did. I believed her. I would clean my upper body quickly every time. When I became more sexually active and quite rebellious, I concluded my mother just wanted to prevent me from letting someone else touch my breasts. I felt she was just using cancer to scare me. There were so many young women getting pregnant those days, that she was afraid that I would be among those women.

But as an adult woman, I am surprised that I still know very little about breast cancer. I know how to check for it but I don't usually do it. I really should, since I have it in my family. There is not even an available vaccine against female cancers available or popular in my country. People are not dying from breast cancers now. They see it as a manageable disease. But from the point of view of a granddaughter who never met her grandmother, it took a part of my childhood that was occupied by a ghost and stories of "what ifs".

When my mother told me she had to go to the hospital for a few days I was afraid that she would lose her breasts. I was hugging myself most of the nights I stayed up waiting for her to come home. I think my fear of hospitals date to that time in my life.

It was the first thing that I asked about when she arrived home. She managed to smile and reassure me that her breasts were fine. But I know that it could always come back. We don't have the money to have her checked out every month like her doctor advised her to do. I know my father would insist she do it if he had the money to take her to her specialist. They save up for 2 check-ups every year. But even now as their twenty-three-year-old daughter, they refuse to tell me when they do go to the hospital. It is because they know I would ask them why and they are afraid that they might have bad news for me when they come back from her doctor.

They never really do. But I wonder what we would tell my seven-year old sister when she gets her own training bra. I guess I should do the talking this time around.

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