Have I prepared for this my whole life?
The panic attacks are familiar. They first happened when I returned home after my successful bone marrow transplant for Hodgkin lymphoma. I was sixteen years old and very much alone. I was supposed to stay home, protecting my immune system and completing the school work assigned to a high school junior. I had the company of a black and white TV and a mutt named Clementine. But when the TV was off and the dog was asleep, panic would rise in me, elevating my pulse and blood pressure, quickening my breath, tossing my stomach like an infant in midair.
Terror is quite natural when you might die a horrible death before the age of 20. I knew of other transplant patients whose cancer had returned and killed them, some as young as eleven years old, some as old at forty-five years old. Making it to forty-five seemed like a massive achievement, almost unobtainable. I felt my neck and collarbone nervously; that was where the tumors always made themselves known.
My parents never spoke of my cancer and never considered that it might help me to speak to someone, if not either of them, about it. They went back to work and ignored the fact that I stayed in the basement all day by myself, learning poetry, French, trigonometry, and physics, and developing a cancer survivor's PTSD. All my fears were for me to deal with. To my parents and sisters, my cancer never existed. Perhaps I never existed.
So it is with somewhat wretched familiarity that I greet panic again, the terror of a premature death, of the pain and degradation of possible metastatic cancer that I have fought my whole life against. The computer system that contains my healthcare records asks me for a goal. My goal at age 54 is the same as it was when I was age 14: not to die of cancer.
I’ll accept being run over by a train, or crashing in an airplane, or freezing in a rural snowbank. I’ll take a massive coronary or just an ordinary morning when I never wake up. But cancer? No thank you.
If I have to be defined by cancer then it will be through defiance. It will be a self that has been forged through suffering, that has been strengthened through devastation. That dares to object and complain because I fear no one and respect very few. That dares to care and to love out of a wisdom born of pain.
I was formed by resisting my own destruction. I exist to honor the spirit of survival in myself and others.
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