Dear Cancer Patient,
I am sorry about your diagnosis. Everyone who goes through cancer treatment has a different experience. I cannot understand all of what you are going through but can relate to some of it. The last five years have not been easy for me either. Seven surgeries, nonexistent white blood cell count, two courses of chemotherapy and resulting heart damage have made me an expert—not about cancer—but about myself.
What has helped me survive an aggressive form of the disease? Good question. I was diagnosed before the latest advances that allow doctors to know immediately whether chemotherapy is working. So the doctors took their best guess, gave me a chance to fight back, and I went along with the decisions, not particularly confident of the outcome.
The “sinking in” of the possibility that I could have died has come back recently with the diagnosis of cancers affecting two close family members. They have aggressive forms of the disease too. Will they make it? Nothing is certain.
The immune system is the police and border guard for the body. It seeks and destroys invaders. A cancer is a mutation, and by the time a cell is cancerous it is identifiable as different from the rest of the body. By rights, no one should get cancer and yet we do, because the immune system gets switched off by environmental factors or as a response to unrelieved stress. Obviously my policing system was not working well. The important part of that sentence is: that was in the past. Lately, the immune police have returned to duty.
Ultimately the power to survive comes after the aggressive medical treatment. The “adjunct” therapies are what pushed me onto the road toward survivorship. After the initial shock and after the doctors had done their best to knock down the cancer, I was able to link mind and body and spirit. Somehow I tapped into the power the mind has to heal the body. My body parts demanded permission to be sick. I told them they also had the power to get better.
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