Intimacy, romance and love after surgery and chemo: insights from survivors
Transcription
Dr. Saketh Guntupalli
I wrote this book, Sex and Cancer, mainly out of an incredible desire to help women regain the things that many of them have felt they’ve lost after a diagnosis of cancer. And one of the things that I find in my practice that women often times complain that they’ve lost after a diagnosis of – particularly gynecologic or breast cancer – is sexual intimacy and having a healthy sexual relationship with their partner.
The book really came out of one patient interaction that I had that really stuck with me, and it’s the first story in the book that we talk about in Chapter One.
It’s a very young patient, only 42 years of age who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Much like many women who are diagnosed with ovarian cancer she had very nonspecific symptoms of abdominal pain, bloating, and she just felt like it was something that was happening to her as she got older.
She ignored the symptoms, had a very good relationship with her husband and her children, and finally one day went to the emergency room. And they told her that she had very bad ovarian cancer.
And she said that the day that happened is the day that her marriage ended. She said that after she told her husband that, he shut down. He was there for her for the surgery, he was there for her for the chemotherapy but after that, never really touched her in any intimate way. She said that the worst part of her cancer was not the diagnosis, was not the surgery, was not the chemo, it was the fact that she felt like she had lost her marriage as a result of the cancer diagnosis.
When I had that conversation, I just was very struck by it and I thought about it for the rest of the day and that whole evening – that a woman who made it through all this, who was likely cured from this terrible disease now was single and had lost her marriage as a result of this cancer diagnosis. So I wanted to explore this in more detail and see what is the incidence of sexual and marital dysfunction in women with these types of cancers, which is really why the book was written and how we came to go through this large study.
Discovering the cancer/divorce link
So, we basically identified four centers in the U.S., we distributed this survey to about 325 women, and we basically found that there is a very substantial problem with sexual dysfunction after a woman is diagnosed with gynecologic or breast cancer. Up to 70 percent of women have this problem.
Up to 70 percent of women have this problem and up to 15 percent of them end up in marital counseling because of it. I think that’s an incredibly important statistic to know, because if cancer is a huge risk factor for divorce or separation, then that’s something that we really need to keep in mind. As members of a society, marriage is the foundation of that, and I think that it’s incredibly important to analyze that, and know that. I think that physicians need to do a better job of addressing these issues and addressing them before they happen.
So the book really goes into about nine patient stories, and with each patient story we talk about survival. We talk about tragedy. We talk about marriages that were saved because of their cancer. We talk about marriages or intimate partner relationships that were disintegrated because of a diagnosis of cancer.
And I’m very proud of the women that were courageous enough to talk to us about how they survived and how they thrived and how we have this ability to rebuild after catastrophe. I think that that’s the most inspirational part of the book.