Sheryl Crow on Beating Cancer Like a Boss

When Sheryl Crow performs, it looks, sounds, and feels effortless—as if she landed on the stage out of nowhere and someone handed her a guitar. As if, five minutes before, she was hanging out with friends and just decided to have some fun and sing some of her hit songs.

In reality, Sheryl’s orchestrating a churning machine of people, schedules, logistics, and obligations, all the while trying to find enough space in her mind and in the day to keep growing and creating as an artist. Of course, she has a professional football-sized team of people whose job it is to take care of her, but in turn, it’s her job to take care of all of them. Without Sheryl Crow the person, there is no Sheryl Crow the tour, the album, the brand. It all falls apart.

That’s a lot of pressure. Even if, like Sheryl Crow, you make it look effortless.

I’ve always shown up for everything that was expected of me. I’ve always delivered on everything.

It was only after she was diagnosed with breast cancer that she decided, for the first time in her adult life, to show up for herself before anyone else.

THE DIAGNOSIS

When she was diagnosed at age forty-four, Crow was the embodiment of health. She worked out religiously, she ate healthfully, and she had no family history of cancer.

My OB-GYN started me with doing mammograms at age thirty-five because I had had several cyst-like masses—I had several lumps that were suspect and required needle biopsies. And then once I hit forty, I went every year. I was a picture of good health. Very fit. Ate well, no family history. Not the typical candidate for breast cancer. And yet, I fell into that statistic of one in eight women who winds up being diagnosed.

I had a mammogram that looked suspect and my OB-GYN said, “Look, let’s not wait the six months. Let’s just go ahead and see what’s going on.” And it turned out to be invasive. Her mom was going through breast cancer treatment and had been one of those who waited six months. She felt it was imperative for whoever’s told “wait six months” to go ahead do their due diligence. So I had a needle biopsy in both breasts and had a lumpectomy done in both breasts. And I was invasive in one and not in the other.

Sheryl had two factors working against her, which thankfully didn’t stop her doctor from her due diligence. She had dense breasts, which were much harder to screen when she was diagnosed (the technology has improved since then). Plus, she was a relatively young woman.

[“Dense breasts”] isn’t a phrase that every woman hears, even when they have dense breasts. And when you do hear it doesn’t mean you know what it means. With technology changing and with there being 3D technology for screening, we’re able to see so much more clearly, fewer false positives, less “come back in six months.”

I hear these crazy horror stories every day about younger women who sense that there’s something going on. And they aren’t being taken seriously. And they’re misdiagnosed. We should take women seriously when they say they feel like something is going on. It’s daunting and it’s also a colossal hassle to go from one doctor to another to be taken seriously. At a certain point when enough doctors say there’s nothing wrong with you, you have to believe that.

THE BATTLE

Putting her “caretaker” role to the side was not only essential to Sheryl’s recovery; it also allowed her to make more meaningful connections with others.

My radiologist said something interesting, “Don’t miss out on the cancer lesson. I can’t tell you what it is, but don’t miss out on it.” I’ve had so many women come up to me and tell their breast cancer story. And almost without exception, the story is, “I had to learn how to put myself first. I had to learn how to put my oxygen mask on before I put on anybody else’s.” And that’s a really hard thing for women to do. We are productive multitaskers and we take care of everyone’s, not only physical needs, but also their emotional needs. And the last person you’ve taken care of is yourself. I think my cancer lesson was learning to say “no” and learning to put myself first. Just the exercise of saying “no” for me was challenging. Sometimes you just have to say, “I can’t,” and you have to be OK with people being frustrated or disappointed. And I think in some ways it really enhances your real relationships.

Sheryl found solace in journaling—but very deliberately, only writing for herself. She also practiced meditation.

I had a great friend of mine tell me that the gateway to awakening is emotion. And to actually hold an emotion, to experience it, is the only way that you will have lived. If you continue to push everything down and not look at things as they are and at least acknowledge and experience despair, disappointment, joy, love—all those emotions that life deals you— you’re just suppressing them. I believe that it surfaces in a health way, or an “unhealth” way.

Part of my experience in life has been to always be busy and to be always working, always getting better. Always growing as an artist, always growing as a writer. And it became, in some ways, a screen. So after I was diagnosed and had completed treatment, I made that commitment to myself to not write and not go to the piano or not go to the guitar or any instrument and make a project out of my experience. Not define my experience by writing a great song or even a poem, but to actually be quiet and to be present and to not go to that thing that I’ve always used to define myself.

Writing in a journal for me was really hard. I mean, to write, to just be writing and not write to be clever or not write to be great or not write to be giving voice to everybody else in the world except for myself, was really hard. It was hard to sit down with a blank paper and just write. And sometimes I felt like it was just like a colossal waste of time. But I would do it anyway, because those are the moments where you meet yourself.

And meditation has been a lifeline, for a brain that is active as mine is with basically self-imposing judgment—and we all have it. We can be very critical of ourselves and we can tell ourselves terrible things about ourselves that simply aren’t true. And meditation, to me, is the tunnel out of that. It’s the way to quiet the overactive part of your mind that judges everything. Meditation also helps you to handle what every moment of the day hands you. It elongates the moment and it slows down the reaction. To just give myself those twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes at night. Those are my moments of just quieting my mind. And it’s a gift I give myself.

Excerpted from BEAT CANCER LIKE A BOSS: 30 POWERFUL STORIES by Ali Rogin published by Diversion Books, Copyright © 2020.

This excerpt was featured in the October 4, 2020 edition of The Sunday Paper. The Sunday Paper publishes News and Views that Rise Above the Noise and Inspires Hearts and Minds. To get The Sunday Paper delivered to your inbox each Sunday morning for free, click here to subscribe.