You received your admittance ticket to the cancer club with your diagnosis. Did you recognize at that moment how much your illness would change you? Probably not. Can you even comprehend now how much cancer dominates your thinking, your emotions, how you live your life?
Just like the beautiful frozen structures that are snowflakes, every cancer patient is unique, with one-of-a-kind experiences. But your cancer and treatments are not the parts that make the whole of you.
It’s time to begin to recognize you are miraculous. If you are living with chronic cancer or have completed your cancer treatments and are in remission, you are alive, which makes you a miracle. Don’t take this extra time on earth for granted. You should be living life to the fullest.
But how, you lament.
Ever since your diagnosis, when the spine in your book of life cracked, you’ve devoted most of your day’s energy, and your even dream life, to cancer. I recommend a change in focus.
It’s time to rejigger how you look at life. To refocus on living, you must toss away your old label of “cancer patient” for a new one. Let’s call you a “recoverer.”
A true friend gives it to you straight. And I need to be that friend for you. So no more pity parties. No more questioning “why me?” I will tell you the blunt answer: why not? There is no rhyme or reason to why your genetic background or your God or your environment may have triggered your cancer. Stop trying to figure out the answer to why me? and start to be a recoverer.
By going through the steps in Chapter 1, you faced the moment you received the news of your cancer. You reconfigured your visceral memory. Instead of a sympathetic response to fight the reality of cancer or fly away from the diagnosis by not acknowledging it, you engage with the moment via a parasympathetic response, by resting your racing heart, relaxing your jumbled mind, and renewing your shattered spirit. You now own your diagnosis. Congratulations, you have begun to heal from the trauma consuming you.