Cancer, three years on
Most of the people who read this blog read the bits about cancer, or so the stats tell me. The most popular page by far is ‘Diagnosis’, which bothers me slightly because it is rather depressing. Yes, I was diagnosed with cancer at 32, and yes it was a terrifying and life changing moment. And those other stats, the survival rates for adenoid cystic carcinoma that I found online in many a desperate internet search, were dreadful. They probably still are dreadful, but I wouldn’t know, because I stopped looking at them long ago.
I’ve learned a lot in the three years since I finished treatment for cancer. Mostly about myself and what I want and don’t want from life, so I guess its been a pretty self-focussed process. But maybe, if anyone visiting this blog has recently been diagnosed with cancer, it might help you to know what happens when the doctors finish rearranging your internal parts, frying you and pumping you with drugs. Or cutting, burning and poisoning, as others call it.
To start with, I was desperate to move on and throw myself back into life. We moved city, I got a new job, and I thought I could go back to normal, albeit with a bit of a new way of looking at the world. That did distract me for a while, but then I started to feel overwhelmed by the prospect of the cancer returning. I had terrible nightmares, all night, every night. They were all about losing control, being unprepared, and suffering terrible consequences as a result. I got over-tired, found it hard to concentrate, had no tolerance or patience, and felt like no-one could understand or help. And I didn’t want to make anyone try to help – it seemed too difficult a problem with which to burden anyone I cared about.
Luckily, I found a psychologist who was ideally suited to help. She specialised in treating people diagnosed with terminal illness, and had actually done her PhD on the topic, so she was overqualified for dealing with someone who was just worried about having a terminal illness. She took me on quite a journey, which started with the premise: I believe I’m going to die young. How can I live my life without obsessing over that so much that I am not really living my life but waiting to die?
After a few sessions, my psychologist helped me deal with the prospect of the unexpected – I’m a person who likes me to be in control, so if I can regain the sense that I have some control, this might put my mind at rest. So she asked me to plan my funeral. I know, I did a double take when she suggested it. I sort of couldn’t believe it – why on earth would I do such a depressing thing? But I’m a girl who does what she’s told (mostly), so I duly went and did it. I wrote a plan that included music, flowers, location, speakers, food, and so on. And when I finished it, I thought, well thats a good little plan, but what an incredibly silly person I am to be worrying about my funeral. This was actually a really helpful step to take, because I started to look at my thoughts from the outside. My obsession with the possibility (or certainty, in my head) of the cancer returning was so dominant it really was preventing me from enjoying life.
After dealing with a few other things, we turned to the one thing that worried me the most – the impact that my early death would have on my two young daughters. At the time, they were 3 and 6. It took forever to even talk about what effect my death might have on them, because even the thought left me in floods of tears. Eventually my psychologist helped me identify what I can do to put them in the best possible position to deal with life without a mum. Again, looking at it from the outside made me realise how unhelpful it was to focus on death so much when I just wanted my daughters to have a great life. But still, I did have a good look at what my girls needed in life, and how I could provide that. I wanted them to have good relationships with family, with their friends and my friends, and to be in a really supportive school environment. And I think we’ve laid the groundwork for all of that.
But actually the best thing my psychologist helped me achieve was to find a new way of looking at my future. I’m a person who deals in facts and I have a very logical mind. There is no point at all in simply saying “There is a chance you’ll die of this cancer but there is also a chance you won’t, so just focus on the positive”. That does not work for me at all. Nor can you tell me that I can’t do anything about it, so there is no point worrying. I’m a lawyer, my natural state is worrying.
No, I had to find a truth of my own to believe in. That sounds really new age and waffly but actually its the opposite. I had to find a way of looking at my future that I believed 100% and that was helpful to me. So I came up with this: Although it is theoretically possible that I might die young of cancer, I might also die at an old age from another cause.
Ok, its not earth shattering, but I believe it completely, totally, 100%. And it is a quantum leap from where I started – being convinced that I would die young from cancer.
More than a year on from reaching that conclusion, there are still some things that bring back the old fears again. I wandered out to the letterbox one Saturday morning a few weeks ago, picked up the local newspaper, and was smacked in the face with an article about a 40 year old man dying from adenoid cyctic carcinoma. His story echoed my own – diagnosed in his early 30′s, young child at the time, and treated successfully initially. But then, my greatest fear – the cancer returned. He had more treatment, but it was not successful and now he had weeks to live.
It felt like a body blow and suddenly I was propelled backwards three and a half years, paralyzed with the fear of a dreadful and premature death. But the fear did dissolve quite quickly, bolstered by what I know to be true – although it is theoretically possible that I might die young of cancer, I might also die at an old age of another cause. Its like an emergency lifejacket now – inflated when necessary to keep me afloat.
I will never, ever, as long as I draw breath, be a person who says they are glad they got cancer because it made them live a better life. I just can’t comprehend thinking that way, although it must be nice to be able to. And I think there is often a lof of pressure on cancer survivers to be relentlessly positive and thankful to be alive and so on. Well bollocks to all that, I think anyone who has had cancer is more than entitled to rant and rave and feel extremely negative for at least a little while. But eventually you do have to get back to living, rather than waiting in fear of dying.
Two little things always pop into my head when I hear someone has cancer. The first is a quote from Winston Churchill: “When you are going through hell, keep going”. My brother gave me a card bearing that quote when I was recovering in hospital from surgery to remove the tumour from my mouth, and it was absolutely perfect. There is no other option, no other way through, than to just keep going. People often said to Andrew and I, you are so strong, how do you do it? And our response was always: what else can you do? You have to just keep going.
The second is a quote from Jonathan Swift that one of my oldest friends gave me on a fridge magnet many years ago: “May you live all the days of your life”. (Thanks Pip!) Its the best advice, because as I found out from first hand experience, if you are not living properly you are just waiting to die, and that is a torturous way to live.
