Support WBUR
As Told To
The Healing Garden at MGH is beautiful. It’s terrible that I belong here
Editor’s note: Jade Moran is a custom jeweler who, for decades, crafted wedding and engagement rings from her Somerville workshop. Two years ago, on November 1, 2022, she had a mammogram screening which led to a next-day biopsy, which led to a diagnosis: invasive lobular carcinoma, a type of breast cancer that accounts for one in seven, or 15% of breast cancers.
Moran put her business on hiatus and dove into the research — at first to advocate for her own care. “It’s a diagnosis that comes with more questions than certainties,” she told Cog. “Lobular doesn’t form a lump, is difficult, sometimes impossible to detect on scans and has only recently gotten attention from the research community; there are no lobular specific treatments. All these uncertainties have led me to advocacy work.”
In a recent email sent to friends and family, sharing her diagnosis with some for the first time, Jade wrote, “In 2022, Breast Cancer Awareness Month didn’t end for me. Instead, my awareness of breast cancer, lobular breast cancer in particular, became amplified and it bled into the rest of November, and into all the weeks, days, hours and minutes that followed. These days I exist in a state of perpetual breast cancer awareness.”
On October 15, 2024, Jade will speak at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute as part of the first ever Lobular Breast Cancer Awareness Day in Massachusetts. Over the past year, Jade recorded voice memos. She shared one with Cog, recorded during a visit to the Healing Garden, a rooftop garden for cancer patients and their families, at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Here she is in her own words.
— Sara Shukla
So I'm in a strange place right now, in a lot of different ways. Physically, emotionally.
I'm in the Healing Garden at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is a beautiful, rooftop garden on the eighth floor of the Cancer Center that overlooks the Charles River. There are birds and trees and grass and Japanese maple. Benches, breeze. It's lovely.
But like a lot of things right now, it contains within it, its own intense opposite.
This is here for me and others because lovely people with a lot of money felt bad enough about what we're going through to spend some of it on this, on us, to make a place for people with cancer.
I've been up here before, before I was diagnosed. I came up very respectfully. I would have left if I had seen anybody doing anything that seemed private.
This time I came with a different attitude. There were doctors and people, maybe residents, leaving with badges. And I thought, “You're taking a tour.” There were people who came up and chatted next to me. And I thought, “You're just up here to enjoy the breeze,” Which is all legit. It's all legit.
But knowing that I belong here now, that it's for me … the beauty of the garden, it’s tied to something really terrible. It's tied to a deep lodestone of grief, of awfulness.
I’m sitting here thinking, also, about other things that feel very intense now, in both directions, simultaneously.
I was reading recently, or heard maybe, something about a person who had experienced quote-unquote “ego death.” It was in a completely different context. I think they were talking about a bad shroom trip or a good shroom trip that had lasting effects or whatever, but I was thinking about that term.
And I thought, having metastatic breast cancer, incurable cancer, cancer that you know will kill you, is kind of like ego death because all of a sudden you’ve got this bird's eye view a lot of the time. You’re forced to grapple with, or maybe you're tapped into, these really, really big questions. And because of that, you've kind of stepped out of normal day-to-day considerations. Mentally you're not always here, here.
You're thinking about these big existential things. But at the same time that comes with something weird, a self-absorbed, opposite kind of ego inflation. Though that doesn’t feel like exactly the right term.
Permission to be selfish, to be self-focused is exhilarating in a way, but mostly it’s just devastating.
I've been encouraged, or it’s sort of implied, you know, that I’m allowed to be selfish. “Oh, now you’ve gotta do all the things you want to do! You have to!” And you have to because you're going to die soon; this is your chance.
Permission to be selfish, to be self-focused is exhilarating in a way, but mostly it’s just devastating.
And then there’s other stuff I didn’t know I could do. I've had to engage in all this new learning and advocacy and research, to understand this disease, and I’m finding out that I have a brain that likes research and science. And is good at it. Which is a huge surprise.
It's made me think also about other things that I'm good at, and acknowledge them, and feel good about them, and maybe even a little egotistical.
But at the same time — and I think this is the truer reality — I feel like I 100% don't matter.
Because none of us do. Because everybody does.
I don't matter because these little cells in my body can come and just take me.
I don't matter because everybody dies.
I don't matter because everybody wants to matter and everybody wants more life.
I met with a nurse practitioner today for something unrelated to cancer. I got a tick bite. And she was great; I really connected with her. I chatted with her a little bit about the research advocacy I’ve been doing, and I suggested that I wouldn't mind other collaborators. She works with a patient advocacy group in primary care. But as I was talking, I realized I was being really intense and telling her lots and lots of technical information, rapid-fire. And I apologized for it a little bit. I do feel like I have to calibrate that and figure out how to maybe dial the intensity down.
But I'm also sort of feeling like, well, if they can't hack it and they can't handle it and they don't want the fire hose, then, oh well. I'm a fire hose.
I'm a fire hose in a universe where I don't matter, but I also matter 100% because the universe only exists in my brain and it’s all I've got. I’ve only got intense opposites.
And it’s amazing because I'm up here in this gorgeous, gorgeous spot and it's mine. Nobody else is up here with me.
But it's also terrible, terrible, terrible, because I belong in this beautiful spot.
I belong in this place that kind people made because they know this experience is so terrible, so traumatic, so awful. They want to do something, anything to help. And the only thing they can do is get some beautiful plants, spend money on a gorgeous view with outside air and put it at the top of a hospital, for respite.
That's all they can do. It’s all they can do.
It's a life of extremes, that's what I'm thinking about. How extreme everything is. No in-betweens, no respite.
Just me, up here.
