Gifts of Cancer: Hope, Healing, and Renewal

A heaviness in my chest…a wheezing when I breathe in deeply…a heart that seems to bounce around in a space left empty by the removal of part of a lung… Were those imagined sounds, feelings, and images I experienced during the last few days while worrying about my imminent CT scan? Were they symptoms of scanxiety? Were they the result of the nocebo effect? Brian Reid wrote about this in a Washington Post article, "The Nocebo Effect: Placebo's Evil Twin": "While the placebo effect refers to health benefits produced by a treatment that should have no effect, patients experiencing the nocebo effect experience the opposite. They presume the worst, health-wise, and that's just what they get." Reid gives as an example a study in which researchers found that women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn't hold such fatalistic views. But wait a minute. After almost seven years of getting follow-up scans, I don't spin out like I used to, fearing and sometimes even expecting the worst. But even though now I seem to be able to manage my scanxiety, my body still reacts. And I have to fight to keep my mind straight. Yes, even though I know now how to prepare for a scan - who to tell and who to avoid, how to seek distraction, practice self care and positive self-talk, even considering the possible benefits of having a recurrence (e.g., getting out of unpleasant family obligations), my body remembers. I thought I'd tricked myself this time. When I called to schedule my scan, I got in within four days, so didn't have even one week during which to think of February 9 as Scan Day. But even with so little time to worry, it happened. Sunday evening, when we went to the movie, Gran Torino (warning: story spoiler coming!), and I saw Clint Eastwood's character coughing up blood, I instantly thought, "Lung cancer - that could be me!", and then, later, when he met his sudden murderous demise, I thought, "Sure beats a slow death to lung cancer!" And yesterday, after undergoing the scan and embracing my beloved husband in the parking lot, I opened my eyes and saw between the concrete posts a sign across the street: "Albert Brown Mortuary." "Oh, no, it's a sign!" I thought. This morning when I woke up, I was thinking the same thing, "It's a sign." But today it was just a sign on a building, not a sign of things to come, because my doctor (bless her!) let me know within hours of my scan yesterday that it was all clear. Today I am experiencing more blessings, gifts, lessons to relearn, a wake-up call that awakened me at 3:30 am with a start. Today, like every day, is the first day of the rest of my life. How am I going to live that life, that life that I know with absolute certainty will end? Such are the gifts of cancer: the incontrovertible reality of mortality; gratitude; faith; humor; hope; healing; and the drive to give something back and leave something behind. LorirnAuthor of Help Me Live: 20 things people with cancer want you to know www.LoriHope.com This post originally appeared on Lori's CarePages blog, Hope for Cancer: what helps. what hurts. what heals.