“I am not sure exactly how or when it started, but somewhere in the midst of chemo, I noticed a change. Things that used to make me crazy no longer bothered me. Other things that I had thought so unimportant that they had been left perking away on the back burner for years suddenly came to a full boil. It was confusing....I kept chugging along, constantly juggling priorities and re-prioritizing them. After a while, I noticed a change in my attitude. I was no longer afraid of the little things in life. I didn’t care if I wore the wrong clothes or said something stupid in a meeting. After my last chemo, I spent a week in the hospital with neutropenia and had another two weeks of bed rest at home. I didn’t physically feel up to doing anything that required more exertion than breathing, but my brain clicked away as I lay there. By the time I started radiation, the transformation was complete. I had become fearless. In spite of the nasty burns on my chest and the pain they generated, radiation was a piece of cake compared to chemo. I had made it through chemo and I was going to make it through radiation just fine. I had faced off the Emperor of All Maladies and won the battle. I felt empowered beyond words and completely confident that I was going to win the war.”
It’s similar to the experience I’ve had, over the 10+ years of my journey with cancer. And, I know from conversations I’ve had with other survivors, that it’s true for many other people as well.
“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” goes the old adage. It’s especially true of cancer.
One of the things we learn as cancer survivors is that our fear threshold is moveable. What moves it is the experience of facing our fears, not running from them. When we face a hitherto unimaginable challenge and move right on through it, we’re strengthened to face other challenges that may lie ahead.
We’re not free of fear as we do so. Fear can’t be so easily banished by positive thinking, nor even by prayer. Most of us don’t pray away our fears: we pray through them.
Often, folks are inclined to match up the word “courageous” with “cancer patient,” but those of us who’ve been through it know it’s not any virtue inherent in ourselves that helps us make this transition. It’s one of those Higher Power things, as our friends in AA would say. When we’re flat on our back on an operating-room gurney, and the anesthesiologist is about to open the valve on the IV line that will send us off into unconsciousness, there’s nothing we can do in that moment to influence the outcome. We’ve got to turn it all over. We have no other choice.
Those of us who are conversant in traditional religious language turn it over to God. Others may go the Higher Power route. But whatever language best captures our experience, there are times when we can sense that fear threshold moving. And the good news is, once it moves forward, it rarely moves back again.
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