For many years after my breast cancer, everything sort of felt like it wasn't "that important, in comparison to dying". (Right?!) Then you pass the five-year remission mark and you stop making that comparison. And yet our scars and our experience remain as constant reminders.

This is the part that so often goes untold and unshared among women. I was so glad to see goop cover intimacy after cancer, because it's the part that shows up. All. The. Time.

“This is the part that so often goes untold.”

I was dating a man during my surgeries and treatments, and we later married, so he was part of the process. But when we divorced and I started dating again, there was a persistent worry about how a future partner would experience sex with me. My breasts look and feel different from natural ones. I have scars, tattooed nipples and different sensations. When is the right time to bring this up? Will he be turned off by me?

Questions like these still show up, and I had breast cancer twenty years ago. Yes, we can all say "your partner loves all of you" and "if he's turned off, he's a jerk". But our inner experience of this may still need support.

If you are struggling with body image, with intimacy, with pleasure, with your physical and emotional scars, I hope you find sisters to talk to, and a container to hold you.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I honour all of our mothers, sisters and daughters who have survived, and who continue to.

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