Fear: The List

I live with fear. I think every cancer patient and every cancer survivor does. Ever since that first bout with breast cancer more than eight years ago, the fear has been like an alien hand, sometimes squeezing my throat, making it tough to breathe, sometimes wrapping itself around my heart.

We Americans find it somehow shameful to admit to being afraid. We don't like to read that soldiers in World War I were so afraid that they defecated in their pants before battle, as Newsweek has reported. We do our best to make the fear go away, with drugs if possible.

And it's a brave doctor who says the "F" word--fear--to a patient. Usually, it's "anxiety" that we are coping with, or "stress."

Here are my fears, large and small:

Dying, of course.

Leaving my children without a mother.

Pain.

Needles and nasty medical procedures.

Being unable to support myself, or perhaps, even to brush my own teeth. Oh, the indignity of that.

And, always, the constant fear that the cancer will stop responding to treatment and go postal on me.

This post is adapted from a longer article I wrote in 2003:
Running With Fear

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

Comments

[Sara]

I have gotten to a point where I am more afraid of going to the doctor than dying. I'm afraid of how much of my time will be spent filling out forms which are themselves like quizzes and traps and waiting, waiting in chairs, waiting months between available appointments for tests and consultations before getting answers, waiting, waiting, waiting. I'm afraid of wrong answers and red herrings and arrogant people who think they know more than they do and are absolutely sure they must control my situation or I should go somewhere else, and I'm afraid of people promising they'll do things they don't until I'm driven to screaming, and then when I scream they tell me there's no call for that.

Gah. I have issues. But my point is that my metastatic malignant melanoma journey has given me more to fear than the disease itself. Mostly I have come to fear other people, all of whom are supposed to be in the business of helping me. I fear them forcing me to make this my whole life.

[jeanne]

Sara--I hear you.

Especially on wanting to scream (I scream when I need to) and on not wanting cancer to be your whole life.

Dealing with other people is tough. I don't think people who don't live with cancer understand this, how much other people can bring you down or make you crazy.

I don't have answers, just understanding. And I applaud your not wanting your whole life to be about cancer--I feel that way too.

Jeanne

[Sara]

Oh, I know you do, Jeanne. I've seen your dogs. :)

I like your term "front loading." It is absolutely what you learn to do.