Health Update: Health Update: Adult female friendships are important. Just ask this cancer patient. – What Experts Say– What Experts Say.
These women are proof female friendships are important
She wanted her best friend to come with to her mammogram, not her husband. They’ve been by each other’s sides through breakups, mastectomies and chemotherapy.
Jennifer Taylor’s breast cancer story started like thousands of other women: by finding a lump.
Her doctor guessed it was hormonal but sent her for a mammogram and an ultrasound just to be sure. In the days leading up to her mammogram appointment, Taylor’s nerves kicked in. She called up her best friend, Adrien Finkel, and asked: “It’s probably nothing, but will you just come with me, because I don’t want to go by myself?”
On the brink of 40 and at the tail end of a devastating breakup, Finkel had just upended her life in Los Angeles and moved cross-country with her two dogs to start fresh in New York City, where Taylor and her family live. She didn’t have a job yet. It was an easy yes.
“My husband was upset that I wanted Adrien to come,” Taylor said. It turned out to be good that she did, though, because men weren’t allowed in the back rooms where she anxiously awaited the results.
Taylor might be on to something. Though an American Perspectives Survey in 2021 found that more than half of Americans go to their partner first when they have a problem, 16% said they go to a friend first. Several studies over the past 20 years have found that having good friends helps people live longer and contributes to better mental health outcomes. In 2016, a study of breast cancer patients found that women who had more social connections were less likely to suffer cancer recurrences and less likely to die from breast cancer than women who did not have a significant support system. The findings affirmed a similar study in China in 2011.
“I do feel so very lucky that I have Adrien and that I have a group of friends that are there to support me, because a lot of women don’t have that,” Taylor said.
‘It’s like being sisters’
Taylor and Finkel have been there for each other through everything since they met in preschool. They went to the same high school and college, were in plays together growing up and saw each other through every birthday, breakup, job, ugly cry, belly laugh and all the moments in between.
“It’s like being sisters,” Finkel said. Taylor chimed in: “But better, because you wouldn’t be as close with your sister.”
It only felt right that Finkel would be there for Taylor now as she was handed her most difficult challenge yet: a cancer diagnosis.
“Adrien fainted” when doctors gave them the news, Taylor said. “I went into, like, survival mode.”
That was in July 2025. Since then, Taylor has gone through three months of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy, all with Finkel at her side. Early on, Taylor’s husband asked her whether she wanted him to be the one taking her to those initial appointments. Taylor told him no − she wanted it to be Finkel.
Taylor loves her husband and her family, and they do sometimes visit her during treatments. But more often, she said, Taylor has Finkel and some of their other girlfriends spend those long hours with her in the hospital. She likes to listen to her friends talk about their lives and the more “normal” challenges of life at 40, like kids, work and dating woes. They work on crafts together, bedazzling clothes and pill bottles. They watch “Sex and the City.”
“Some people want to be with their husbands. But the first day Jen really kept saying, ‘I just need Adrien,'” Finkel said. “I think there’s something that has felt kind of − not girly − but female about this whole experience.”
Their followers think so, too. Taylor and Finkel started an Instagram account to post about Taylor’s cancer journey. Most of their followers are women, Taylor said, and some of those women have become their friends.
“The support is unreal,” Taylor said.
Cancer, kismet and the comfort of girlhood
Taylor and Finkel know not all cancer patients have a best friend who lives close enough to go to appointments with them, let alone the time to do so.
“The timing is crazy,” Finkel said. “I happened to not have found a job yet. So my purpose became, like, be there with Jen. Whatever is going to happen, I’m just going to be there.”
“It was so sweet,” Taylor said. “Adrien had this thing inside of her that was like, ‘I can never let Jennifer be alone in that scary hospital.’ And I didn’t even think about that, but you did.”
They have a core group of girlfriends from their college days at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music who still send one another birthday presents each year. “They’re our family, too,” Taylor said. Finkel reached out to them and kept them up to date about Taylor’s condition, and some of those friends have come with Finkel to Taylor’s chemo treatments.
“It’s girl time,” Finkel said. “There’s something about the gathering of women that is so healing.”
Taylor feels especially lucky to have such close girlfriends at her age, she said. “A lot of women, a lot of their friendships kind of dissipate and fade away as they get older,” she said. “And that’s really sad to me.”
Taylor and Finkel hope their social media posts can help other cancer patients feel more hopeful. When Taylor was diagnosed, she said, she tried to find other breast cancer patients online to connect with, and all of their videos were devastating.
“It was really depressing. It was really hard. It didn’t make me feel better,” Taylor said. “That is part of this whole journey, but it’s not all of it.”
Taylor and Finkel make a point to find humor and laugh in their videos while explaining the realities of what cancer care looks like. “I only knew what chemo was from watching scary movies and seeing people in a chair, like, kind of out of it,” Taylor said. Women have reached out to them in recent months for support on their own cancer journeys.
“If I can handle this, you got this, girl,” Taylor tells them. “You can do this.”
Madeline Mitchell’s role covering women and the caregiving economy at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Reach Madeline at memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ on X.