How Shifting My Assumptions Changed My Cancer Journey

If you stay present, you can stop shouting and learn to listen instead — both to those around you and to yourself.

Although my breast cancer diagnosis resulted from a lump I’d felt, I was still shocked. There were a couple of assumptions I was operating under at the time.

The first was that women my age — I was 37 — didn’t get breast cancer.

I was born and raised in Dubai and lived there my whole life until my husband and I moved to the United States in 2016 when he had a job opportunity. In Dubai, it wasn’t taboo to talk about breast cancer. We had awareness campaigns, but they were all geared toward women over 50, urging them to get a mammogram.

That led me and all the women I knew to assume you could only get breast cancer when you’re older, which obviously isn’t true. But the belief was so embedded in me that there was no way I would associate a lump with cancer when I wasn’t even 40 yet.

The other assumption was that if you have a lump when you’re in the midst of nursing a baby, as I was, it’s always mastitis. After I mentioned it to my doctor, she gave me medication to clear what we all thought was a blocked duct.

But when it kept getting larger, she said we should get it tested to be on the safe side. I thought testing would check cancer off the list of possibilities, but it turned out to be a tumor after all.

There I was, in a new country with a 3-month-old baby and a husband who traveled a great deal for work, and I was getting diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer. That’s when I realized everything I thought I knew about this disease had to change.

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Overcoming perceptions

My first thought when I was diagnosed was that I didn’t want to die from this, and if that was what happened, I wanted to hang on as long as possible.

I’d just become a mom. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my daughter, Jiyana, behind.

I remember blurting out to my gynecologist: This can’t be it. I want to be there for her first day of school. I have to make it that long to see her walking through that door.

In some ways, thinking this diagnosis was an automatic death sentence was another assumption I had to face. It darkened my perception immediately and made me feel panicked and helpless.

Fortunately, I have an amazing gynecologist who was an advocate for me immediately. She pushed for all the tests to be done sooner, for the treatments to start right away, and she told me we’d take it one step at a time.

I learned that making a pivot toward that viewpoint, of just taking things as they came, was much better than assuming I knew what was next. Even when you don’t have cancer, you don’t know what could be coming next. You don’t know the outcome of the decisions you make now.

You just have to choose what’s best for you based on the information you have and move to the next step.

You have to listen to your body, ask tons of questions, and don’t believe everything you find through Google. That perspective is how I learned to let go of those assumptions and be fully present instead.

It’s very human to panic and feel like screaming when something like this happens because you have deep fears about the future. But if you stay present, you can stop shouting and learn to listen instead — both to those around you and to yourself.

Getting support, but standing on my own

Although I hadn’t lived in the United States for that long when I got my diagnosis, I was fortunate that my family had come for Jiyana’s birth and my mum had decided to stay an extra month. She was due to leave when I found the lump, which changed the plan considerably. She ended up being here for a year to take care of the baby and me so my husband could continue working.

At the same time, I wanted to talk with other women going through their own cancer journeys, and I went to some in-person breast cancer support group meetings. But all the women in those groups were older. They talked about end-of-life issues, and I thought: That does not work for me. I felt like an alien sitting there.

Not long after, we moved from Toledo, Ohio to Richmond, Virginia. I looked up support groups there and found one for younger women. I finally felt like I found my group. It was beautiful.

They had kids, talked about going back to work after treatment, and talked about fertility issues. It felt like a better fit for me. I also found a support group online of women about my age, and I loved that we could just talk about all the treatment effects openly.

When you discuss that stuff with people who don’t have cancer, they tend to feel sorry for you — and going through this is already tough enough without having to deal with pity, too.

After some time, I was finally at a good point where my mum was able to leave. That turned out to be a good thing because I hadn’t been on my own.

I had to figure out how to overcome things, and really, how to be a mum myself. This helped me bond more with Jiyana and appreciate the whole idea of motherhood. Being alone when my husband was traveling was hard and lonely, but it was also valuable because that made me more resourceful and resilient.

Maybe that was one last assumption — that I couldn’t do this on my own. But that, too, turned out to be wrong.

Not only did I get to know Jiyana in a whole new way, but I also got to know myself in a new way.