Thursday, December 28, 2006
Anxiety
Most of my posts have been general thoughts on the large topic of cancer, and not focused on my personal experience. The good news is that most days, I am Jen, not Jen "the cancer survivor", or Jen "who can't think of anything but cancer". When I was first diagnosed, I used to live a life where my inner-dialogue was cursed with thoughts of the disease, wondering if my death would be long and painful and who my husband would remarry.
Over the past year and a half, I've largely moved from that anxiety ridden state of mind, to a new normal. Sometimes the fact that I had cancer catches me by surprise. Those moments used to be bad moments, because the anxiety would wash over me anew. But now I just say 'yes, that happened' and I move on with whatever I'm doing.
Until something spooks me.
An on-line friend recurred about a month ago, and it really threw me. Nothing about it made sense-- Amy had one of those sleepy pathology reports that I envied-- zero positive lymph nodes, a small tumor, Grade 2 cells. She was going to be fine. Until the disease went to her spine. Which she learned a week before her boyfriend was to propose to her on a Jamaican beach. This wasn't supposed to happen to Amy, and certainly not so soon after finishing chemo. It was supposed to happen to people like me-- people with big tumors and 15 positive lymph nodes (a lot, to you civilians). I had a bout of anxiety, the type that kept my feet tapping and my mind racing. I felt the urge to run (I went to the gym a lot that week) as if I could escape the cancer that was surely out to get me. I was horrified for my friend, and since I had spent so much time thinking about what I would do when/if my cancer advanced, I could too well imagine what she was going through. And if she was having this challenge, I was surely next.
Another jolt to the system was a fund raising letter that I received from the Young Survivors Coalition-- an advocacy group for young women with breast cancer. In their appeal they stated that only 50% of young women diagnosed with breast cancer survive 10 years. Which was BIG news to most of us young survivors who received the letter. And while I could immediately see this statement for what it was, an old statistic used to elicit badly needed dollars, it still caused all the anxiety symptoms that have become standard issue at this point. My chest tightened, I felt short of breath and I struggled to clear my mind of what I knew, intellectually, to be untrue. That stat is old, doesn't include the treatment protocol that I had, or any of the newer chemo protocols that have come along in the past 5, 10 years. But still, the challenges of living cured surfaced-- the struggle to remain in a healthy denial of statistics and the fickle hand of fate.
Over the past year and a half, I've largely moved from that anxiety ridden state of mind, to a new normal. Sometimes the fact that I had cancer catches me by surprise. Those moments used to be bad moments, because the anxiety would wash over me anew. But now I just say 'yes, that happened' and I move on with whatever I'm doing.
Until something spooks me.
An on-line friend recurred about a month ago, and it really threw me. Nothing about it made sense-- Amy had one of those sleepy pathology reports that I envied-- zero positive lymph nodes, a small tumor, Grade 2 cells. She was going to be fine. Until the disease went to her spine. Which she learned a week before her boyfriend was to propose to her on a Jamaican beach. This wasn't supposed to happen to Amy, and certainly not so soon after finishing chemo. It was supposed to happen to people like me-- people with big tumors and 15 positive lymph nodes (a lot, to you civilians). I had a bout of anxiety, the type that kept my feet tapping and my mind racing. I felt the urge to run (I went to the gym a lot that week) as if I could escape the cancer that was surely out to get me. I was horrified for my friend, and since I had spent so much time thinking about what I would do when/if my cancer advanced, I could too well imagine what she was going through. And if she was having this challenge, I was surely next.
Another jolt to the system was a fund raising letter that I received from the Young Survivors Coalition-- an advocacy group for young women with breast cancer. In their appeal they stated that only 50% of young women diagnosed with breast cancer survive 10 years. Which was BIG news to most of us young survivors who received the letter. And while I could immediately see this statement for what it was, an old statistic used to elicit badly needed dollars, it still caused all the anxiety symptoms that have become standard issue at this point. My chest tightened, I felt short of breath and I struggled to clear my mind of what I knew, intellectually, to be untrue. That stat is old, doesn't include the treatment protocol that I had, or any of the newer chemo protocols that have come along in the past 5, 10 years. But still, the challenges of living cured surfaced-- the struggle to remain in a healthy denial of statistics and the fickle hand of fate.
# posted by Jen @ 7:31 AM 
