Kathy and me at Relay for Life celebrating the milestone of the end of chemotherapy
it has served its purpose.
Suffering is necessary until
Suffering is necessary until
you realize it is unnecessary.
Eckhart Tolle
I visited a colleague recently, a cancer survivor who works in the field of substance abuse recovery. I sought her advice on how to make the transition from active cancer patient to recovering survivor. My burning question was "How do you resume “normal” life while carrying the fear that the cancer might come back some day and you'll have to do the whole treatment thing over again?”
She told me a story about how she believed she had neatly put away her own fears and anxieties regarding her illness only to have them come rushing back when a friend wrote her a very poignant letter about her view of her recovery from cancer. "I realized that I had simply put my fears in a box and put duct tape around them, thinking the tape would hold. It didn't." She mentioned how she was freaked out when she tried attending a support group. "It was too intense and there was too much anger," she said. This was a shock, coming from someone well trained in 12-Step support groups (you should hear the stuff recovering addicts talk about, it could make Satan gasp). She went on to say how she realized she had to come to an understanding of what had happened on her own terms.
"What about people who say that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them?" I asked, "That seems like a bit of a stretch to me." "That's the mind trying to put it in the box," was her immediate reply. "While I can say I have learned a lot through having cancer, I would gladly have learned those lessons in some other form," she added. "Yeah, it seems that what they really mean was that surviving cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them, I get that," was my reply.
"I wish I could tell you that there is a precise way to drop the fears and go on," she said with more than a hint of empathy. "I will tell you that when I finished my treatment I met with my oncologist and told him that I was tired of worrying about this all of the time so I was giving it to him to worry about. I told him it was his job now, that I was resigning." She said it didn't work completely, but it felt good at the time.
I thanked her as she handed me her business card. It had her cell phone number on it and she told me I could call anytime or stop by again. We hugged and said our goodbyes and I drove on to my appointment at the oncologist's office. Later, reflecting on our conversation, I realized that I had experienced the purest form of therapy: Two people sharing a deeply personal experience and being willing to avoid demonizing or exalting it to try to gain some artificial control over it. It was a true exchange of compassion. That mutual compassion is something that I have experienced repeatedly since my diagnosis. I realized that this might be the best thing to come out of my experience; cancer has been a bridge that has allowed souls to meet on common ground, hearts open.
Eckhart Tolle
I visited a colleague recently, a cancer survivor who works in the field of substance abuse recovery. I sought her advice on how to make the transition from active cancer patient to recovering survivor. My burning question was "How do you resume “normal” life while carrying the fear that the cancer might come back some day and you'll have to do the whole treatment thing over again?”
She told me a story about how she believed she had neatly put away her own fears and anxieties regarding her illness only to have them come rushing back when a friend wrote her a very poignant letter about her view of her recovery from cancer. "I realized that I had simply put my fears in a box and put duct tape around them, thinking the tape would hold. It didn't." She mentioned how she was freaked out when she tried attending a support group. "It was too intense and there was too much anger," she said. This was a shock, coming from someone well trained in 12-Step support groups (you should hear the stuff recovering addicts talk about, it could make Satan gasp). She went on to say how she realized she had to come to an understanding of what had happened on her own terms.
"What about people who say that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them?" I asked, "That seems like a bit of a stretch to me." "That's the mind trying to put it in the box," was her immediate reply. "While I can say I have learned a lot through having cancer, I would gladly have learned those lessons in some other form," she added. "Yeah, it seems that what they really mean was that surviving cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them, I get that," was my reply.
"I wish I could tell you that there is a precise way to drop the fears and go on," she said with more than a hint of empathy. "I will tell you that when I finished my treatment I met with my oncologist and told him that I was tired of worrying about this all of the time so I was giving it to him to worry about. I told him it was his job now, that I was resigning." She said it didn't work completely, but it felt good at the time.
I thanked her as she handed me her business card. It had her cell phone number on it and she told me I could call anytime or stop by again. We hugged and said our goodbyes and I drove on to my appointment at the oncologist's office. Later, reflecting on our conversation, I realized that I had experienced the purest form of therapy: Two people sharing a deeply personal experience and being willing to avoid demonizing or exalting it to try to gain some artificial control over it. It was a true exchange of compassion. That mutual compassion is something that I have experienced repeatedly since my diagnosis. I realized that this might be the best thing to come out of my experience; cancer has been a bridge that has allowed souls to meet on common ground, hearts open.
That mutual compassion sounds like a beautiful experience, we need to come up with a way to experience it without the whole cancer part. But then again it may take something that catastrophic to gain the kind of insight you speak about.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear the chemo phase is complete and keep plugging along!