Siobhan Dillon, 35, has wowed audiences on Broadway and in London’s West End. Now, she’s singing to support breast cancer patients with her new album, “Siobhan Dillon — One Voice.” At 30, Dillon had no symptoms when, "I was grocery shopping, picking up broccoli when my brain said: ‘Get a mammogram,'” she told SurvivorNet.
She brushed off the message thinking, ‘nobody gets breast cancer at 30.’ Still, at her next checkup, she asked about having a mammogram. Without a lump, however, insurance wouldn’t cover the test for a woman her age. Instead, she was sent home with breast self-exam instructions.
Read MoreThe lesson in her broccoli-inspired intuition: “Listen to your body,” says Dillion, who is also a Yoga Nidra teacher with a regular meditation practice, “it will tell you what it needs.”
A Lumpectomy
A mammogram and ultrasound led to a biopsy which, she says, “sounds and feels like an industrial staple gun piercing the skin, extracting tissue. Bang!”
Back on stage that night, Dillon got the news the next morning: Her 1.5-centimeter tumor was malignant.
"I remember wiping away inconvenient tears," she says. As she was scheduled for a lumpectomy for her stage 1 estrogen-positive breast cancer, Dillon imagined a future of hospitals, surgery, chemo, and radiation and hormone therapy — tamoxifen — which would induce menopause.
Dr. Ann Partridge, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, discusses breast cancer in younger women.
“I was hurtling towards someone else's life.” She also remembers thinking, “Okay, this is my time to die.”
After getting a second opinion, Dillon opted out of chemotherapy, a decision she admits is controversial. “I just had the lumpectomy, radiotherapy, and hormone treatment and along with daily meditation and a lot of self-care, have been cancer-free for 5 years.”
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Now, in an effort to sidestep a recurrence, she’s a passionate advocate of meditation and self-care. Before cancer, although her lifestyle was healthy, “I was always in fight or flight,” she recalls. “My cortisol was always elevated. Things had to change for me.”
“Letting Go Was The Hardest Thing To Do”
But change took time. Dillon continued to perform in Miss Saigon, determined not to let her diagnosis consume her. “I felt like I needed to carry on working, yet everyone in my life — including the doctors — advised me to stop. To rest. Especially after the operation,” she recalls.
“Letting go was the hardest thing to do. Letting other people help. Allowing people to care for me. It felt strange. I felt lazy!”
“Stop Running Around Like A Headless Chicken”
Today, she tells young women facing a breast cancer diagnosis to slow down. “Stop running around like a headless chicken,” she says. “I believe that this sort of disease is the body's way of waking you up. It's a nudge to take better care of your self emotionally and therefore physically.”
Now, her meditation practice keeps her connected to her body’s own wisdom, reducing the constant worry of recurrence, that many that cancer survivors recognize as “scanxiety.” Says Dillon, “when you quiet the mind and you go into a meditative state, you’ll get the information you need.”
Meditation, she adds, isn’t always easy: “It’s so brave to look inward. People talk about meditation like it’s always going to be pleasurable. Some days you cry and feel terrible.”
“But you’re working toward a deeper understanding,” she notes. “Sit quietly. Just watch the mind. Don’t judge it. Just do it. Listen to what your body is telling you. When you get clear of all the static and noise, you’ll start to get little messages. When you let the layers fall away, you get clear.”
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