What a year it has been ... but hello 2017, here I come!
4 minute read time.
FormerMember
- Most women were just walking along, living their lives, when they were blindsided by breast cancer. Unless you had a strong family history of the disease, you' probably said, "I never thought it would happen to me" at least once.
- After treatment, now that you've learned in a very painful and immediate way that it can happen to you, you may find yourself overwhelmed by fears that it will happen again. Fears of recurrence are particularly persistent as you're first leaving active treatment, when you go from seeing an oncologist of some kind every week or every other week to checkups every three months, and then every six months. You may expect that you'll want to throw yourself a party on your last day of chemo or radiation, only to find that you're a little melancholy or fearful, thinking, 'Maybe I should be getting more treatments just to be sure?'
- It's hard to shift back to a life where treatment is less in your face than it was before," she says."Treatments keep you busy and occupied and they take a long time, when you finish treatment you're at loose ends, wondering if it will come back. You want to think that someone's still watching.
- Give yourself -- and your treatment plan -- credit. "You worked so hard to identify a plan of action and worked so hard to make it happen. At the end, you have to stop and give yourself credit for what you've just achieved, then pause and shift to a different phase in your life.
- Maybe you heard a news story about someone and found yourself thinking, "Why didn't my doctor recommend that to me?" Remember, you don't know everything about someone else's breast cancer. The woman next to you in the waiting room may seem like she has a very similar type of disease, but there could be factors you don't know about that make you very different. - - Will there ever be a day that you don't think about breast cancer, or worry about it coming back? Yes, it does recede. Eventually there were whole days when I didn't think about it. Time is a healer in that sense." The above extracts were taken from an article about Breast Cancer Survivors written by Marissa Weiss, Jami Bernard and Gina Shaw from the WebMD website.
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I think the above article is a very accurate reflection on how I feel right now. 2016 has certainly been a year that I will ever forget. I never intended to start a blog that other people would read, I just need somewhere to vent my fears in the early days. I've just been writing down exactly what I feel (hence the typos and lack of grammatical correctness!). It's been really nice to receive comments about what I have written, from my friends and from people I don't even know. I didn't think people would be interested, let alone read/follow my journey. As the extracts above mention, no two cancer survivors have the same journey, maybe similar but never identical. I'm certainly no medical expert and my own experience has only touched upon the surface of the world of cancer but I hope that I can show that, yes, sometimes it can be possible to be diagnosed with cancer and to come out smiling at the other end. Only a few months ago, my whole world came crashing down on me and it was very dark. Now I about to start a new year feeling positive and ready to live my life again and have a lot to smile about. I am not going to 'try and forget' 2016 but I am going to see it as the year I got lucky and was given a second chance to live. Cancer diagnosis /fear of recurrence will always be part of me but I certainly agree that time is a great healer and it no longer dominates my thoughts for the long periods of the day in the way that it did, not so long ago. It may come back, it may not, I can't sit around all day worrying myself senseless about the 'what if' and focus on the 'now'. It may come back and if it did, at least I have a little more of an idea of what to expect and less of the 'fear of the unknown'. Hopefully the positive things that has come out of this journey is that it has made me stronger and re-evaluate my priorities and know who/what is important to me in my life. I have learnt a lot about myself and my body and that it's ok to allow for 'me' time. I can't control the future but I can do my best to try and keep fit healthy and to spend happy times with my loved ones and try to say 'yes' more rather than 'I don't have time'.
I'm returning back to work soon in a couple of weeks, I have a marathon to walk (and to start preparing for) and lots more to plan ahead with my family and friends in the new year ahead. Hello 2017, here I come! A happy and healthy New Year to everyone!
