Processing a cancer diagnosis.
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I ran smack into a brick wall. I hit it with the full force of 40 years’ worth of dreams and plans, and mistakes and regrets. Alanis Morrissette was screaming “Isn’t it ironic?!” loudly in my ears at the point of impact. There I was talking about fertility planning with my doctor one day, only to be told the next that I had invasive breast cancer and would be rendered infertile by the treatment that would destroy it.
At times over the last few months, it has felt like the moment of hitting that wall is on repeat and being replayed over and over again in slow motion. And yet at other times I’m bearing witness to it, observing and documenting every scene in some feeble attempt to figure out how on earth that brick wall appeared in the first place, and how the hell I failed to avoid it.
In my search for answers, I started researching. I treated it like I would my work where I have spent over 20 years immersed in plans, projects, law, facts, evidence, and data. And boy, do I love a good plan - I have a plan for my back up plan, and a contingency plan if that back up plan fails. And so, I set about project managing the shit out of that first 6 weeks when I was otherwise at risk of drowning in a tsunami of hospital admissions, tests, scans, specialist appointments, and forms.
What I couldn’t easily find was information about how all ‘this’ might feel. Now, the A-Z of emotions to expect when facing your own mortality is a pretty hefty-sized book. And I’m confident I dog-eared the edge of every page in the first week after being diagnosed. But what I wanted was a sign post, or just a smoke signal, to point me in the direction of the missing chapter of ‘N’ for ‘Normal’.
I came to realise that there was no such thing as normal through listening to other people’s stories. Instead I listened to random chance encounters about how someone had come through the other side of cancer, and sobering reflections about those who did not. And from there, I allowed myself to create my own normal by accepting how I was feeling when I needed to feel it, and to listen to my body for the first time in a long long time.
