If you had asked me two years ago after I went into remission after a hellish battle with a life-threatening head and neck cancer whether I would be okay for it to ever recur, I quite possibly may have asked you whether you were okay? I mean, no. No, I most certainly would not be. I have seriously considered applying to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders to have Scanxiety listed as a diagnosable mental disorder such is the severity of the symptomatic ruffability I have been sick with over the course of the last 6 years of many half yearly “check-ups” for cancer recurrence.
Sure, as the scans kept rolling in all clear, and as I kept meditating my fear started to dissolve in between the scanxiety episodes. But in a recent angiogram for something completely unrelated, my worst fear stormed forward. A suspicious looking solitary lesion on my right lung that doctors suspected could be cancer recurrence. Several more scans later and it appears there is also another unusually active lymph node in my neck. Both now requiring medical biopsies this week.
I share this news not for sympathy but more because of my certainty that whether these visitors are cancerous or not, greater wisdom and personal evolution is sure to violently burst forth from both the extremely torturous process of finding out or the action I will be required to take depending on the outcome. The impact of both scenarios will see me a completely changed person from the lessons learned. And that is the stuff of share worthiness.
One thing I have learned from my meditation practice and spiritual studies is that the world out there is always changing. The more we live our lives in reliance on things in our life staying the same as they are when we are happy and in flow (like I have been for a while now) for our peace, the more likely we are to not be okay when they unexpectedly shift. This is why I have spent the last seven years dedicated to cultivating a self-sufficient steadiness that comes entirely from within, no matter what is happening to me or around me. Man, oh man is that new adaptation energy being pushed to its limits this week. But am I hustling just a bit better than I was the first time I faced into this fear? Damn straight I am.
Is the fear of a biopsy result that has me facing another round in the ring with cancer paralysing me at times? Yep. Is the hope that these are just unusual but explainable infections keeping me afloat? Yep. Anyone who has experienced the personal prison you enter when you wait for health diagnosis results will know that there is quite literally nothing anyone can say to you in life, in therapy or even with the kind offer of mind-altering medication to set aside the terror felt as one tests, tests some more and then waits. Miraculously good or hideously bad news could be around the corner for me.
Either way it goes, what is making me prouder than punch is the noticeable increase in my strength and resilience that I am able to demonstrate for my family, my daughter and ultimately for the betterment of my own inner peace compared to the version of me before I learned to meditate. I am not okay right now. Whoever really is in the deep dark wells of the unknown? The chips feel more than a bit down until I know what this is and I am scared. But I am more okay not being okay than ever before. So, Up, Up and Okay.
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