Jennifer Rosenblad and Amy Appold are best friends who live in Columbia and have both survived breast cancer.
They spoke about the benefit of knowing other survivors who fully understand the challenges of treatment, as well as about how community support was important during their experiences.
For the month of July, we're focusing on the ways that cancer treatment can impact a person's health and well-being.
Jennifer Rosendblad: You definitely become a patient. I usually – before I would go once a year. I even did a one stop, like, “you just do it all,” because I don't want to go to the doctor.
And now, it's you still keep seeing your plastic surgeon, you see the oncologist, you see your breast surgeon, you see, sometimes, a hormone health doctor.
It just becomes almost like a small job of a sort because it's usually at the hospital too, where they're not on time, and you have to park in a garage and walk a long way.
So, whenever I have a friend now doing any kind of test, I'm like, “I will take you. I know that hospital so well.”
Amy Appold: Everybody wants you to be well –
Jennifer Rosendblad: Yes.
Amy Appold: – and they're just ready for you to be. “Oh, so you're all good now!”
Jennifer Rosendblad: Yeah
Amy Appold: And you want to be, you want to sort of come through for them and say, “Yeah, I mean, I'm not dying tomorrow,” you know, “but at the same time, there's a lot going on.”
And it's only another survivor that, like, you just immediately
Snaps
"That sense of feeling supported and loved in that way that was even more important than the actual help."Amy Appold
Because all you have to do is just look at the person and be like, “I've been through this,” they know you've been through it, and yeah, then there's an understanding there, and a level of confidence, I guess.
I think that every kind of suffering that I've had in my life is absolutely the thing that has deepened my faith, that has changed me in ways that nothing else could have changed me, and it's the kind of thing where I would not trade it. I know it's, like, what people say, but it's true.
So, it's okay to be to let yourself be vulnerable, to let yourself be helped.
When we, when I was first diagnosed, that very first day, I had sent an email to just a few friends, and one of them responded and said, “When you get back into town and you have that doctor's appointment that you're having the day you come back, under no circumstances will you cook dinner that night.”
And my very first instinct was to say, “Oh, that's okay, you don't need,” you know, and to tell her she didn't need to do that.
And then I feel like almost an audible voice told me, 'No, you're saying yes to that, and you're gonna say yes to everything that people offer to do for you.” And I was like, “I am?”
So, I came home, and I told my husband that I was gonna say yes to everything, and he's like, “Well, I don't know if you have to say yes to everything, you know?”
And I'm like, “No, I really do, because if I start saying ‘No’ to some things and not others, I'll just be like, ‘I need to say no to everything,’ you know? This is the only way for me. I have to do this.”
And it... it was actually so beautiful because it was really clear to me that it really wasn't the – I mean, of course, yes, people taking my children three days a week for the entire day was huge – a huge, huge help, but also just that sense of feeling supported and loved in that way that was even more important than the actual help.
