\u2018It\u2019s this perfect storm of stealing your femininity.\u2019<\/p>\n
Whitney Johnson was diagnosed with breast cancer at 36.<\/p>\n
Whitney Johnson, now 38, in Portland, Ore.<\/p>\n
Leah Nash for The New York Times<\/p>\n
My boyfriend found it. He could feel a lump. I have a family history, so I didn\u2019t sit on it. <\/p>\n
Going into this, I was trying to figure out where I was in my relationship. I was trying to figure out where I was in my career. And I was about to lose all my hair, cut off my breasts, and I might not have estrogen ever again. It\u2019s this perfect storm of stealing your femininity when you\u2019re supposed to be feeling at your height of womanhood. <\/p>\n
I have so many obnoxious selfies from the two weeks between getting diagnosed and starting chemo. I felt beautiful at that moment. I knew it was all going to go away. <\/p>\n
I held this silly, weird ceremony before I cut my hair. I read a few things. Friends came over and staged the place with flowers. Then they all came with me when I got my hair cut. <\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think it\u2019s easy to get cancer when you\u2019re 75, either. But what I\u2019m jealous of is where you have gotten to in your relationship at that point, hopefully. I was still at the phase of, I don\u2019t want you to see this. I want you to think I\u2019m sexy. <\/p>\n
We were not in the place in our relationship that tolerated that amount of neediness. One weekend, I was pretty sick. I was texting him, but he was at a cabin partying with his friends. I\u2019m sure he would have wanted to be there for me, but he couldn\u2019t. He was like, \u201cI need a break.\u201d I was like, \u201cI might die: Talk to me about that.\u201d <\/p>\n
I can look back and see, he did deserve a break. His life changed a ton, too, and I don\u2019t think his friends were in a position to adequately support him. <\/p>\n
Having this breast reconstruction has been one of the hardest lasting parts. Every time I\u2019m intimate, I can\u2019t feel my breasts. That takes me out of it in a heartbeat. Something that used to be so intimate now is such a large cause of pain. <\/p>\n
I ended up drying some of the flowers from that little ceremony. At some point when I have this feeling of, this is OK, I\u2019m OK, I want to sprinkle them into a fire, or just release them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s this perfect storm of stealing your femininity.\u2019 Whitney Johnson was diagnosed with breast cancer at 36. Whitney…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[11266,7966,687,250106,250107,108637,97,250108,36103,96458],"class_list":["post-565444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-age","tag-breast-cancer","tag-cancer","tag-chronological","tag-colon-and-colorectal-cancer","tag-head-and-neck-cancer","tag-health","tag-middle-age-demographic","tag-ovarian-cancer","tag-vis-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}