This is Part 1 of Genevieve and Sheila’s story about how a shared breast cancer diagnosis brought them together, and how these newfound bosom buddies used inappropriate humour and harmless antics to navigate a frightening diagnosis.
Cancer is a disease that will touch all our lives, yet only some of us will know what it is like to live with it in our bodies.
Breast cancer is the second-most common cancer among women in Canada, next to non-melanoma skin cancer. Approximately 31,900 Canadian women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, a number that breaks down to 87 women daily. To shape this statistic into a tidy fraction, the lifetime risk of breast cancer is one in eight.
As helpful as statistics are for digesting information, the truth is that people are not statistics, and breast cancer can be an identity-shifting and lonely experience, even as our loved ones do their best to support us. No one knows what it is like to live with cancer until they have it, making it especially challenging to communicate what they are going through with others.
Genevieve McNamee is a breast cancer survivor who, in the midst of this life-altering disease, found someone who knew exactly what she was going through. Someone who could understand this strange, uninvited language she was suddenly made to speak, a language that hardly anyone else could understand.
McNamee found this new friend in a Facebook breast cancer support group called “Bonded by Breast Cancer.”
“I resisted for a long time joining the group, I really did,” said McNamee. “It probably took me about six months to be included in it, and once I was in, I was like, ‘Oh, you dolt! You should’ve joined six months ago!’”
It was through conversations in the private Facebook group that McNamee met fellow survivor Sheila Nugent-Smith, and this connection blossomed into a friendship based not only on shared experiences, but on ample portions of inappropriate humour, playful light-heartedness, and good old fashioned fun: qualities that some might find surprising while undergoing the seriousness that is cancer treatment.
For McNamee and Nugent-Smith, however, it was a matter of navigating a breast cancer diagnosis while holding on to the joy life can bring.
“It was in that private Facebook group that Sheila and I realized that we were going to be going to radiation at the same time, and we were both from the Comox Valley. We were like, ‘Hey, do you want to meet for coffee?’ Then from there, we instantly had a connection,” said McNamee.
Together, McNamee and Nugent-Smith underwent six weeks of radiation treatment in Victoria.
“We were probably the pranksters of the (cancer) lodge. We were the comedy entertainment, definitely,” McNamee said.
“We were down there for Halloween, so we took the bus to the mall and wandered about in our costumes,” said Nugent-Smith. “She was an elf, and I was a penguin. I would walk like a penguin, waving to everybody.”
In addition to comedic hijinks, McNamee and Nugent-Smith also shared Angel Flights from the Comox Valley to Victoria on treatment weeks. Angel Flight of British Columbia is a volunteer-led non-profit where experienced pilots provide cancer patients free air transportation to treatment centres on Vancouver Island and the mainland.
“My husband would drive me down on a Monday, and then on Fridays I would do an Angel Flight home. I’d have my treatment early Friday morning and I would be home by noon,” said McNamee. “That was such a blessing, just loved it. But Sheila and I did one together, and that one was fun. It was a pretty fancy little plane.”
Making the best from adversity is just one thing these self-proclaimed “breast friends” have in common.
“We both love books,” Nugent-Smith said.
“We go to the Rotary book sale whenever they have it,” said McNamee. “Sheila is very artistic. Sheila is a weaver, Sheila is a knitter, a crocheter. She’s an artist. I am not! I am cerebral. I work for an insurance company. I am a rule follower, an attention to detail person. So from that perspective, we’re kind of opposites, but the humour and the empathy and the understanding of the emotions around going through a cancer journey, I think that is just what made it click.”
Nugent-Smith added: “We probably would never have met, just because of such different paths our lives were on. If we never had cancer, we never would have met.”
Sometimes, life after cancer treatment can be an unspoken part of the healing process, complete with its own ups-and-downs. Next week, Genevieve and Sheila share how they navigated this post-treatment experience together.