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Home Breast Cancer Center Advanced Breast Cancer  Deepening of
love   Those fortunate enough to have partners who stay with
them throughout this ordeal often experience a deepening of
their love. Just as individuals come to feel as if they
themselves are challenged and enlarged by the experience of
dealing with cancer, so the same can be true of loving
relationships, which can also grow in meaning and depth and
mutual respect, with the shared experience of the two partners.
Bonnie Gelbwasser's love and admiration for her husband grew in
the course of her illness:  My husband and I met when I was 15
and he was 18; we were friends for four years, then dated for
two more before we married. This is a long and loving
relationship that has grown deeper since my breast cancer
diagnosis. Cancer took away my breast and, for fourteen months,
my hair, and there were times I feared it would rob me of my
sanity. I did not have a strong self-image before cancer