A Three-Year Reprieve From Cancer & I’m Still Standing

It’s my third cancer anniversary, or if we’re going with the BC/AD time stamp (before cancer/after diagnosis), mark your calendars. It’s 3 AD.

As they say, hindsight’s 20/20, and in my case, hindsight’s 2020. (That’s the year I got diagnosed).

And I just had my last appointment with my chemo doctor. Not because I’ve graduated from the oncologist, they’ll routinely check for no recurring cancer until there’s nothing left of me to prevent, but because my doctor’s retiring.

How does he get to get out of this mess before I do?

I know. I’m being selfish. But in all fairness, we have a relationship that I could never explain anyway. When you trust someone enough to kill/not kill you, you’ve been through the trenches together and shared an experience that no one could understand.

So, if my doctor retires, can I call it quits too? Take the whole experience back. Say it wasn’t so.

Still, my body’s here to remind me of what I went through if my doctor isn’t.

For my last appointment with my dear doctor, I walked down the same hallway I came through with my covered bald head, looking enviously at the patients with hair, even wondering how they could look so happy, as if nothing was wrong with them.

Only to wake up and see I’m that person now.

Yet, with my late appointment, no patients were in the hallway, only me. Even my friends who worked at the front desk were gone. The sterile, white walls were the only reminder I once sat in the chemo chair while the drugs coursed through me, killing everything in their path except the worry of what would become of me.

And there I am, telling that old me it’s okay. I’ll be fine. Here I am. I’m fine. I am. I’m not in that chair anymore. I’m still standing.

That old me can only see myself as sick. That chair had a way of doing that.

I want her to know to enjoy it. She’s being taken care of. She’s loved.

I couldn’t go there then. I longed for responsibility amid all that uncertainty. If only I could be in control of my life again.

But that’s the thing about hindsight. I see things differently now.

But before I do, it’s time for me to reprieve. And write that next article in my series that I got sidetracked from writing. Help others who are going through difficult times. Remind them there will be a day they have hindsight, too.

We go through quite a bit of left-brained activity when we have a crisis; any crisis at all will do. With doctor’s appointments, information overload, deadlines, complications, misunderstandings, and the left-brain activity of life that goes on without us, we have a lot to contend with when we have an illness.

And then, if you’re anything like me, it can start triggering anxiety, fight or flight, depression, and before you know it, you’ve spiraled downward. All those things are inevitable when you have too much of your left brain working and insufficient right brain nirvana.

But if you take a reprieve from that left brain activity and start to use your right brain, fantastic new worlds open up to you.

It’s a long, arduous journey, and by now, you’ve hopefully read the articles I wrote for Philly Flair (or else I have them listed below) and found the doctors who comprise your support team who will lead you through it and you have to put your trust in them.

And that frees you up for this new phase of activity, where you do what the doctors say and don’t question it anymore.

If only I could have found peace with it then, listen to who I am now.

There’s a nirvana to not analyzing and just being. Be one with love, peace, and serenity, like the trust exercise where you fall, and you know someone will be there to hold you.

Chemo taught me what I couldn’t do for myself: accept that peace, take that reprieve, and live it fully. It gave me that moment where I didn’t have to operate in my left brain (chemo killed those cells for me), and it truly freed me up to be in my right brain and to experience the true bliss of the love I received from my nurses, doctors, family, and friends.

It poured into me and made me realize the extent of what I did for other people to show them I loved them and what I needed to learn to do for myself.

Here I was receiving gifts upon gifts, not writing thank you notes, not even remembering if someone had even given me anything until months or years later, and they said, Did you like that cross I sent you? Or how was that ice cream? And then what they had done for me jolted me. And then a new wave of love would overcome me.

Isn’t life grand?

Taking that reprieve means we’re not in control of whether we get hit by joyful waves that are fun to ride or the tsunamis that threaten us to our core.

We might tumble, get tossed, pulled, and pushed like seaweed, and when the water subsides, we take our first breath and realize we’re okay. We’re humbled to know we’re not in control. And that’s okay. We never were, even when we thought we were.

Reprieve brings us to patience. It makes us slow down, unwind, and say, hey, I’m going to have the patience to withstand this journey and ride this wave, however long it takes, however hard it throws me, and I will lose control.

So when we come up for air, we breathe and have the hindsight that three years after death has come and gone, and now I know that’s okay, I’m still standing.

But sometimes, I can’t remember that peace when life gets so out of control. I want to push life harder; I don’t have the time, patience, or humility to do what chemo was trying to teach me all along–surrender.

Why surrender when I have my life back? I can do what I want now.

And what do I want? I want to remember what it felt like to surrender my life to my doctor.

I sure am going to miss him.

Reclaiming responsibility for my life is hard work, even without my doctor trying to kill/not kill me.

Now, I’m a stranger to cancer, even to my chemo doctor, but when life gets out of control, hindsight’s 20/20, or 2020, in my case.

Anniversaries are still here to remind me to draw from that place cancer took me.

Life’s storms come and go as they see fit, yet if we learn how to remain in the eye of the storm, everything’s okay. We’ll find that by God’s grace, we’re still standing.

No wonder I hear Elton John singing, “I’m still standin’ better than I ever did. Lookin’ like a true survivor, feelin’ like a little kid.”