I believe in growth and change, kindness and compassion, being mindful, and trying to be a better person. Am I there yet? No. I am not.
Nearly six years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Today I’m healthy. I still feel fall-on-my-knees gratitude for good doctors, good science, and my all-around good fortune. Many people, including some I know, have not been so lucky. Some have died. Some continue to undergo treatments that are among the most barbaric lifesaving measures medicine has to offer. Besides exacting a physical toll, cancer treatments can be psychologically and emotionally difficult, and when the outcome is uncertain, you are in a special kind of hell.
A year after my initial diagnosis, an incomplete message from my primary care doctor’s office led to a couple of anxious hours when I thought I might have developed a different kind of cancer. I was completely unprepared for the desolation I felt at the prospect. Was this what the rest of my life would be—one cancer diagnosis after another, disease and treatments alike whittling me away until I was gone? I tried to rally some mental toughness, telling the boyfriend, “We’ll do whatever we need to do,” but the words, like me, were hollow.
My doctor called and clarified: not cancer. More fall-on-my-knees gratitude for my good fortune. A little less gratitude for a receptionist who didn’t know how fragile I was a year out from the original diagnosis. But overall, a lesson in Be Grateful for Every Minute You Are Here and Healthy.
Amid all this gratitude and mindfulness, I have developed some responses that are at odds with my attempts to be a more enlightened human being. Case in point: My almost violent objection when a friend insisted on bringing me chicken soup after my diagnosis. Soup is for sick people. I was not sick—and how dare she imply that I was. I pulled that cloak of stubborn indignation tightly around me and glared out from its depths, which didn’t stop my friend from bringing me soup, which I accepted with a tight smile.
I had the same hostile response a few months ago when another friend invited me to attend a fly-fishing weekend especially for breast cancer survivors no matter what phase they were in on their “cancer journey.” In the email equivalent of that tight smile when chicken soup was forced upon me, I replied, Oh, thanks, but this is really not up my alley.
It’s a wonder I have any friends at all. Their takeaway must be, “Don’t even try to do anything nice for her. She won’t appreciate it.”
The thing is, in some way, I do appreciate it. Someone made me chicken soup from scratch because she thought it would make me feel better. Someone who participated in the fly-fishing trip last year thought enough of me to extend an invitation to me. The least I could do—like, literally the least—is be gracious.
Here’s where I confess what you might have already suspected: I’m not a nice person. I just am not. From the beginning of the experience, I was militantly opposed to being regarded as sick. This was not because I thought a positive attitude would make a difference in my physical health. It was because my response was the only thing I could control. Adopting a tough, fierce outlook made me feel better mentally and emotionally.
I haven’t mellowed with time. In fact, I’ve become increasingly resistant to having my identity inextricably tied to cancer. Cancer happened to me, but it’s not who I am. It’s not yet a blip on the radar, but that’s exactly what I want it to be. That is all I want it to be.
The Stones were right: You can’t always get what you want. There are triggers, and now and then one of them comes my way and puts me right back in that place, the place where I had to be so strong that I refused to acknowledge fear or physical pain. I wouldn’t even use the words. Fear was “apprehension.” When I felt like razor wire was wrapped tightly around my ribcage, I admitted to being “uncomfortable.” On the phone with the surgeon, trying to find a pain med that would work, I escalated to “really uncomfortable.”
Language is more than how we characterize a thing. It carries deeper meaning. In some ways, it is the thing. When you use the phrase “cancer journey,” you are triggering every primal response I have, including fear and denial. How I respond to what you say is my problem, unless you have the expectation that I will embrace the phrase or the experience of being on a “cancer journey,” in which case you’ll be sorely disappointed.
I cannot—I cannot—be on a “cancer journey.” I’m on some kind of journey, though, and I hope it leads me to be a better, more tolerant, more compassionate person than I am now.