There is a Buddhist proverb that says: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
The student (me) wasn’t ready, but the teacher (cancer), appeared anyway.
These past few months have afforded me an opportunity to learn many of life’s lessons since being diagnosed with breast cancer late last winter. I have been a student in life’s classroom with cancer as my teacher. I was not ready for the many lessons cancer has taught me, and continues to teach me.
In the face of potential death, I am learning about life from this life-threatening disease. As with many of life’s lessons, I do not realize that I have been taught something until I look back to where I was at the start of the lesson.
What are some of the lessons cancer has taught me?
Life is sacred.
Each day, I wake up and realize the gift of life I have been given and how I took this for granted until cancer came.
The lives of those who have surrounded me in this cancer journey are gifts to me that I cannot buy, but are freely given out of love. These are the most powerful, most healing gifts one will ever experience in living.
A cancer patient cannot get through dealing with the devastation of this disease without the support of family, friends, and their medical team. My oncology social worker, cancer nurses, and doctors have been the calm in this cancer storm by keeping me focused on getting through each stage of treatment, one step at a time.
Good health is taken for granted. I’d been the model of excellent health until my cancer diagnosis. Years of regular exercise, proper nutrition and a positive outlook got me through the most difficult time of my life with surgery, chemotherapy, and a multitude of complications. Radiation is still to come, starting next week.
Getting through chemotherapy is a lot harder than healing from a mastectomy. Enduring six rounds of chemotherapy elevated my patience and perseverance to a level previously unknown to me. I had no control over how my body would respond to treatments. It didn’t like the chemo invasion.
Early in my treatments, I learned the absolute necessity of being an active partner in co-managing all details of my cancer care, monitoring symptoms, and quickly acting on suspicions. I learned that chemo infection symptoms can be subtle and deadly dangerous.
Chemo’s side effects taught me to trust my intuition more than in the past. On more than one occasion, my intuitive hunches ended up with diagnoses of febrile neutropenia infections. Thankfully, with chemo treatments ended, my risk for infection dives dramatically.
I learned that the will to live is a strong, positive force in my life that carried me through chemo’s challenges. The positive spirit of other cancer patients, and their will to live are inspirational. As sick as I was with chemotherapy, there were other cancer patients around me who were even sicker.
Lastly, living with cancer has taught me is that it’s OK to cry. There have been tears of being overwhelmed, tears of frustration, tears of fear, tears of sadness, tears of pain, tears of regret, tears of relief, and tears of joy. All of these tears in their own way, made the cancer journey easier to bear.
I keep moving forward in this cancer journey with gratitude for my life. Each day, I am stronger than the day before. Each day, I choose to live with Strength, Courage, and Determination.