30. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first.

It’s one of the few times when putting yourself first is required.

The point is, you can’t help anyone if you’re not ok. But taking care of ourselves doesn’t come naturally sometimes. It feels like we’re being selfish. There are so many other things that need to be done. We prioritize our needs last because we’re so busy taking care of everyone else.

As the oldest in my family, I always felt that responsibility. My mom didn’t speak English fluently, my dad was on the road a lot, so I always felt like the “mom”.  In my culture, you are trained to think of everyone before yourself.

But you can’t take care of anyone if you are not taking care of yourself. The basics:  eat right, get rest, be in good health. Go to your doctor appointments annually. Go to the dentist twice a year. Use sunscreen. Get exercise. Pay attention to whatever seems not “right”. Your intuition is speaking to you for a reason. Don’t ignore it.

Last year, I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer: DCIS. It’s the best kind, if you’re going to get it…very high cure rates when caught early. Even so, I needed a lumpectomy, radiation every day for 6 weeks, and now I’m on tamoxifen for 5 years. I never smoked, have no history of it in my family, considered myself pretty healthy. So I was really shocked. There were some mornings where I’d think to myself “I have cancer” because it didn’t seem real to me.

That’s an extreme case of making sure you take care of yourself. But so many women I spoke to (I felt it was really important for me to share my story so that women would feel incented to get mammograms) had not had one even though they knew they needed to, because of family history or prior medical issues.  I would have never found the cancer through self examination: it was behind my nipple. Only my routine mammogram would have picked it up. And my options would have been very different depending on when I found out.

So, do what the airline attendants tell you. Oxygen mask on you first.