Stories of Hope

When I was deep in the midst of chemotherapy … bald and exhausted, still waiting to learn whether the therapy was killing my tumor … I gradually started wanting to learn of other women’s experiences with breast cancer. I craved commiseration, but wasn’t yet up for support groups. So I bought some books. I had enjoyed reading the book reviews on Planet Cancer (www.planetcancer.org)  – a web site geared toward young adults with cancer — so I bought some of those it recommended, and I commenced searching for hope.

I can say that I’m grateful to the authors of each of the books I read — sharing their stories took courage and talent and energy, and they did affirm my own experiences with the strange world that is cancer treatment — which, in its own way, is very comforting.

However, they also seemed to affirm more of the awfulness of it than the hope. I felt like each author (maybe I selected the wrong books to read?) still had mountains of worry to face after treatment — high risks of recurrence (and actual recurrences), huge bills, ongoing health problems, etc. And I didn’t feel as buoyed or encouraged as I’d hoped. I wanted someone to tell me that I wasn’t going to die. Strangely, I didn’t happen upon much that made me feel confident of my own survival chances. (I had stage 2B — in my lymph nodes — and the tumor was resistant to chemo.)

What DID finally help me, however — enormously — was a set of audio-stories I found inadvertently in the New York Times. IT told the stories of many people — MANY — with PANCREATIC cancer (the cancer that tends to make us all shudder because it’s commonly known to be a death sentence) — who had survived for many years. I listened with great interest to each that day, not thinking much about it. But in ensuing days, I became aware of a huge shift in my outlook. My mood lifted. I felt increasingly hopeful about my own survival. I only had breast cancer, after all. If these pancreatic cancer survivors had done so well, maybe there was hope for me too.

I’m still looking for more stories like these — I’d actually love to compile more into a book to offer others who, like me, need to hear that it CAN be ok. For now, I offer this link to those stories — listen and be encouraged!

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/17/health/healthguide/ TE_PANCREATIC_CLIPS.html

A New Phase of the “Cancer Experience”

This cancer journey is an odd one. When I started this blog last November, I had just finished radiation the month before. We had a “Remission Accomplished” party, and I felt joyful to have treatment behind me.

I also, however, felt a little frustration. So many well-meaning friends/loved ones seemed so eager to be finished with cancer — they had asked me throughout treatment when I’d be “done” with it as if it were a course of antibiotics that would be the end of my illness once and for all. And part of me wanted to tell them that I wouldn’t be “done” with cancer any sooner than another trauma victim might be “done” with their experience. Chemotherapy, Radiation, Surgery … they all dispel the physical part of cancer. But the emotional impact lingers … it leaves marks on the spirit. It is a trauma of sorts. And I guess I wasn’t eager for all of the love and support to evaporate like the regular doctor visits had.

It’s the strangest thing. While going through treatment, you get accustomed to weekly — sometimes even daily — visits to the doctor’s office, where a whole team dedicated to keeping you alive waits to measure your every function and feeling, and to help you through. Of course a whole lot of that becomes tedious and wearisome … but some of it is affirming. It feels good to have a team of people so concerned with your well-being. So while I dreaded — even sometimes cried over — all the needle sticks, and the cold, bone chilling toxins pumped through my veins, and the nausea, the breath-taking bone pain, the radiation burns, and the crushing fatigue of treatment — I liked seeing my nurses. We became a sort of family. And I felt a loss when I ceased to see them regularly.

Maybe that’s why I felt defensive when I felt my friends and relatives also pulling away. I knew that they — for very good reason — wanted to be finished with cancer — but I wasn’t yet. And I felt a bit dismissed.

I’ve since read articles and books about other women’s similar experiences — about depressions setting in when it was all over — depressions when the world expected rejoicing. Because, what wasn’t immediately apparent to anyone, even ourselves, was that while we were doing treatment, we were surviving. We were mobilized. We had a fight to fight, and a team to help us with it. But when the fight ended and we sought to recover our previous lives, and to let our guards down … well, the flood of emotions, the changed outlook on life having faced our own deaths, the sudden loss of our support systems … that was overwhelming too.

So I found myself craving what I had previously shunned: the company of other “survivors” who understood and could affirm my own experience. While I had at first disdained the whole “survivor” community as victim-types who wanted to hold on to cancer as an identity, I now understood that, as one who has beaten cancer (for now), one becomes, like it or not, part of a community that understands things others can’t. And I wanted that ready camaraderie.

So I went to breast cancer seminars, I reached out to “survivor” running groups, and support groups … I started a blog.

And then, almost over night, and much to my surprise, I didn’t want to think or talk about cancer anymore. Suddenly I was finished. I could feel my old/normal life start to feel comfortably familiar again, and cancer started to become part of the past that didn’t hold me anymore.

Cut to today: it’s 8 months after my first and only “cancer conqueror” blog post, and I realize that I’ve just experienced another piece of the journey: the letting go piece. The moving on piece.

I had been feeling guilty for not posting here until I realized that distancing from my cancer experience was yet another valid — and likely healthy — part of my own journey.

Yet I don’t think the fact that I’m back now indicates any sort of relapse. It just means I’m ready now. I’m ready to talk about it again — not to dwell, or complain, or mourn — just to share experience, strength, and hope from this new perspective.

There have been so many gifts through the whole journey — gifts that remain now the cancer has gone.

Let’s talk about them!

Hello World from CancerConqueror!

 

REmission Accomplished!

So I’m Beverly. I’m 39 years old, and I have spent this most recent year of my life healing from breast cancer. Stage IIB /3A  invasive ductal carcinoma with lymph node involvement. I’ve spent most of my career as a technical writer in Austin, TX, but I’m completely new to blogging.

I’ve wanted to blog because in my cancer journey, I found a lot of things on the internet that made me more scared that I would die of my cancer; but I did not find a plentiful supply of things that made me feel more hopeful that I would not die of my cancer. I’d like this to be part of the latter.

In twelve-step programs they speak of sharing “experience, strength, and hope” with each other, and I’d like to borrow that term for what’s offered here.

At the same time, I don’t want to minimize the fear and devastation we cancer patients feel when we get our diagnosis. Yes, I think it’s a good idea to keep our heads in a positive space as much as we can, but I want to always

acknowledge that for many of us, when we’re in the middle of our cancer ordeals, that’s just not realistic … or even fair … to expect. I think we have to have permission to be terrified and/or angry and/or depressed as hell … or whatever else we feel without being made to feel weak or bad if we don’t “stay positive.” Getting through cancer is an arduous process that encompasses the whole gamut of feelings, all of which, I think, are valid.

So why “Cancer Conqueror?”

For some reason, for me, the term “Survivor” has always evoked a tattered, barely-alive cast-away sort of figure (these days, usually emerging from the jungle in some reality tv show). And I know there’s an element of that for most of us when our treatments are over. We ARE ravaged by the physical assault of  the “medicine” as well as the mental torture of facing death and wondering how our lives, our loved ones, even, for some, our children, might be robbed by this disease.   But I wanted a term to better reflect the other side of the experience as well. There IS more to us than that. I think we can come out on the other side as strong whole people with our heads high and our lives deeply affirmed by the whole experience.

So let’s talk about it all here. Our fears, as well as our joys. Our anguish, as well as our “experience, strength, and hope” that will let us, ultimately, believe that it’s all gonna be ok. Because it is.

She Believed She Could, So She Did

Resting with Meredith the Cat

One of Many Infusion DaysRadiation is Over!