You could have knocked me over with a feather,” said Lauren Watson as she lounged on the couch in her living room in Westwood, legs curled in a ball as she recalled the most dramatic moment of her life. “I said, ‘I don’t understand. What are you talking about?’ The doctor replied, ‘You have cancer. You have breast cancer. You need to come into Dana-Farber tomorrow.’ So I did.”
In that moment, Lauren’s priorities shifted 180 degrees. An otherwise healthy 41-year-old woman was suddenly lumped in a category that includes 12% of the world’s female population. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, a harrowing statistic, and Lauren was now a member of that group.
Complicating matters even further was the timing of this discovery. The world seemed much more innocent on February 27, 2020, the day Lauren received word of her diagnosis: invasive lobular carcinoma. Less than two weeks later, everyday routine came to a screeching halt as the COVID-19 virus shut down schools, businesses, activities… life.
Now, any previously-traveled pathway to health wasn’t an option. With three elementary school boys stuck at home Zoom-schooling and the world in chaos, Lauren embarked on her most important journey, balancing motherhood, work and an anxiety she had never dreamed possible.
“The first hurdle was that I knew that I had cancer, but I didn’t know what type it was, how far it had spread or what the treatment was going to be. I didn’t know any of that,” said Lauren. “I was being told repeatedly that doctors couldn’t tell me any of those things until I was able to have a lumpectomy, which is the surgical procedure where they go in and take out as many of the tumors as they think they can find.”
Lauren also needed a sentinel node biopsy, a procedure during which doctors make a fairly large incision in a patient’s armpit and take out several lymph nodes to assess if the lymph nodes are spreading the cancer to other parts of the body.
But this was 2020.
“Sorry, your surgery’s been canceled,” said Lauren. “It was a total nightmare. ‘We don’t have enough ventilators. You can’t come in the building.’ I just remember pacing in the backyard and meanwhile, I’m doing my job, my kids are on Zoom-school. It was insane. I just kept having faith that if it was really threatening my life imminently, they would have done something differently. I had to trust my doctors and the system enough to say, ‘I’m going to do what you’re telling me.”
The team at Dana-Farber started Lauren on Tamoxifen, a drug that lowers the body’s production of estrogen. Lauren’s specific cancer feeds on estrogen, so this seemed like a natural treatment under the circumstances, but typically Tamoxifen is prescribed AFTER surgery, AFTER chemotherapy treatments and AFTER a patient has clarity about how significant, widespread or under control her cancer is.
“I started taking this crazy drug and didn’t have surgery until June, so from late February to June, I didn’t know how bad it was. It was pretty terrifying.”
Meanwhile, her house full of testosterone provided a combination of support and normalcy. Lauren’s husband, Ian, recalls the tenuous time vividly.
“It was pretty profoundly crushing, trying to wrap our heads around what this news meant,” said Ian. “I wanted to do nothing except put on the most positive, ‘We got this. You’re gonna get through this, whatever it takes,’ sort of attitude. We’re lucky to be in a place where there’s a pretty phenomenal care team available to her and we were able to tap into that team. But, any agency she had in all of this was limited even further by the pandemic. God, it was just surreal and in a particularly cruel way. The stress of not being able to leave the house, not being able to see a family member, not knowing what to do next.”
“Ian is a doer and his love language is acts of service,” said Lauren. “So he was in overdrive doing all the things. ‘You’re tired? Take a nap and I’ll take everyone where they need to go. I’m going to clean this house before you get here.’ He just does and does and does and does and does. It’s like he doesn’t run out of energy. When I was sick, it was just about, ‘How many tasks can I complete? How many things can I do so you don’t have to.’”
Meanwhile, three rambunctious boys were caged from societal interaction and attempting to process what was happening with Mom.
“I’ll never forget it. We sat them all on this couch and, as soon as I said, ‘Mom has breast cancer,’ Jack jumped onto my lap and started to cry,” said Lauren. “I was so grateful to the Dana-Farber social worker who had been working with me, because I very quickly was able to explain things to the boys. They wanted to know if I was going to shave my head and I didn’t know. The social worker had coached me. Sometimes kids’ understanding of cancer is that it’s this big, scary thing that people die from.
“She gave me this analogy – tell them that some people have a German shepherd, pit bull type of cancer, some people have a chihuahua type of cancer and some people just have a golden retriever type of cancer. You can tell them that you have the golden retriever cancer.”
Peter and Liam, twins, are currently in seventh grade at Thurston Middle School. Jack started his freshman year at Westwood High School in September. Lauren and Ian married in 2017, with Ian inheriting a house full of boys after many years as a bachelor.
“Imagine going from living on your own for the vast majority of your life and then you step into this? It’s literally the opposite of my prior existence,” said Ian, who is the associate director of college counseling at The Rivers School in Weston. “I learn something new every day. Not having raised the kids when they were really little and leapfrogging into the elementary years, it’s been a lot but it’s been exciting, too.”
“My boys are sometimes wild animals and sometimes they’re like the most docile, loving, thoughtful people in my life,” said Lauren. “Our life is pretty hectic. They’re involved in a lot of different activities and Ian and I are really busy, but we try hard to do a lot of what I call ‘Forced Family Fun.’ I like to think we’ve always been that way, but COVID changed that for a lot of people, and obviously having a life-threatening illness will really, really hammer home how important family time is.”
“It’s a circus, but if there is anyone who can manage multiple rings of chaos, Lauren is really good at it,” said Ian. “Without a doubt, she’s one of the best parents I’ve ever known and observed. I have, arguably, one of the best teachers too. She is so patient, so understanding and so kind. It’s pretty remarkable to see her and observe her in that space because she is at her absolute best in that mode.”
Lauren is also among the top college counselors in America, working individually with students and families as they navigate a course toward education after high school. With a very calm, confident demeanor, she provides counsel, guidance, advice and a dose of reality during a strenuous time, keeping students on track while keeping parents focused on what’s most important.
“The best way to move through the college process is to lead with authenticity and let your child evolve in whatever ways they are going to evolve,” said Lauren. “I tell most students, ‘You’re not behind.’ I encourage them to take a deep breath. I have a sign in my office that says, ‘Deep Breaths,’ and I purposely put it right over my shoulder so that while they’re talking to me, they have to look at it! I think these students are under an inhumane amount of pressure – high school students, especially in really wonderful communities like ours, there tends to be an assumption everyone is going to go to college right away. It creates an incredible amount of pressure on the kids and I just want to say to all of them, ‘It’s okay to take a beat. It’s okay to take your time and try to avoid letting other people’s stress be contagious.’”
Handling stress during the college application process is one thing. Managing an overwhelming and unpredictable ball of stress during a battle against cancer amid a global shutdown is quite different. In 2020, as Lauren dealt with her diagnosis and the subsequent postponements of necessary surgical procedures, she discovered a new community, others who were dealt a similar hand and some who had previously navigated the bumpy road to recovery.
“It was really startling to me to learn how many other people, how many other women in this town that I knew, who told me they also had battled breast cancer,” said Lauren. “But not until I said, Hey, I have breast cancer! I feel, as women, we’re so slow to ask for help. We just want to power through – or maybe I’m just talking about myself. I remember feeling like I shouldn’t burden people with this because it felt like everyone else’s house was on fire. It was COVID. Everybody was afraid. Everyone had all kinds of crises going on at the same time.”
Alas, Lauren did need help and found strength in community.
“I can think of three women who live in this town who got on the phone with me and talked me off the ledge,” she said. “We’re not close friends, but I knew who they were and it was so comforting to hear from these women who had walked the road ahead of me. They’d say, ‘Okay, you have to learn this whole new language.’ I mean, I know more now about this than I would’ve ever had to know. There’s a whole bunch of jargon and there’s procedures and abbreviations for things that you never want to know. But it’s just really helpful to be on the phone with somebody who knows what you’re talking about.”
After a tumultuous three months, Lauren finally underwent the necessary procedures in June of 2020, undergoing a double lumpectomy and sentinel node biopsy. Another surgery followed in March of 2021 to cosmetically improve the appearance of her breasts after radiation treatment was complete.
“What a lonely space that creates,” said Ian. “No matter who you have around you, and we had an amazing support team of friends and family. I don’t think there will ever be a way for me to truly have an accurate sense of just what that is, despite being a passenger in it with her. She has gone through a ton, period – no matter if it’s stage one, stage four, it’s cancer and it’s pretty terrifying. The fact that she gets up every day and just does it and does it well, puts on her absolute best for the kids. You would just never know.”
Three years later, the thought of cancer’s return still looms front and center in Lauren’s mind.
“I spent all day Tuesday at Dana-Farber this week,” said Lauren. “Every six months I go for my scans and every six months I hold my breath. So my advice? Advocate for yourself. I think women are praised for being intuitive, but we’re also often totally dismissed when we say, ‘Something is wrong, I need you to help me.’ That wasn’t my story, but I’ve met a lot of people and read a lot of stories of women who knew that something was wrong and it took several rounds of them advocating for themselves with their doctors to get the proper care and attention that they deserved and they needed.
“That and ‘Feel It On The First.’ Give yourself a breast exam on the first of every month. Go for your regular mammograms. Mine wasn’t found in a mammogram, but that doesn’t mean that having those baseline images wasn’t helpful to my doctors.”
No cancer journey should be traveled alone, and it’s clear through teamwork, communication and determination, with the resources we have available in 2023, anybody fighting breast cancer should feel empowered and hopeful. Lauren’s path to health, unconventional and unsettling, reminds us every story is as unique as a fingerprint, with an ability to inspire and educate as we look to eradicate cancer’s impact.
“Sometimes I marvel at how lucky I am to live so close to some of the best cancer care in the world, to have had insurance, to have a network of loving people who supported me,” said Lauren. “It could have been worse in so many ways. I am so grateful.”
For more of my conversation with Lauren about her business, Watson College Consulting, visit the Westwood Living Podcast Network, found on SoundCloud, Spotify, Amazon and YouTube.
