Cancerversary

On this day two years ago, I heard the words “…lymphoma in your gallbladder.”

I stared out of the grubby hospital window into an abandoned courtyard, and thought, “Just like that, my life has changed for ever.” I knew immediately that lymphoma is another word for c-a-n-c-e-r, and the shock was disembodying. I think I floated around, dazed, near my own head for a minute or so, and didn’t really come thumping down into the experience until I heard the word oncologist. Then it was real. Coldly real, sickening, and applying to me.

It came completely out of left field. For all my intuition, I did not spot this coming, most of all not at this time. Whereas a typical cancer diagnosis comes after a person presents to the medical system seeking answers or for routine screening, this hit me completely unawares. Yes, I was bitter and deeply unhappy and had been for some time, but I held no awareness of the way this dysfunctional energy had coalesced in my body. I was less surprised when the breast diagnosis finally came, weeks later, as I’d had suspicions nearly two years earlier - but had been repeatedly reassured I was too young for either breast cancer or a useful mammogram.

Ironically my youth and fertility disguised the blatant lump of post-menopausal woman’s disease, while leading directly to the discovery of the occult lymphoma. And only then circuitously back to the breast cancer, which was again disregarded, even in the face of a known cancer diagnosis. It took one of the most highly radioactive scans to identify what my fingers and intuition had been saying all along: something’s not right. All is not well in my world.

I have never desired an intimate knowledge of the medical system, and yet my life path was suddenly paved with drab linoleum and lined with a succession of sharp instruments. The detour has been psychic as well as physical, and I’m not yet done with making meaning out of it, either. Maybe I never will. Maybe it doesn’t matter, beyond really grasping that the NOW is all that we ever have.

But the detour has changed me. Obviously some of these changes are physical, like the numb heaviness of muscle and implant where there was once a soft breast, and the strange itchy vacancy where the muscle was taken from my back. Some of them are mental, like the moments when my processing memory drops out and I can’t understand what was just said to me. And some of them are nothing less than sacred, like the exquisite weight and blessing of sitting with a friend on the day she died of a disease that I survived.

What does one do with all of this, the unasked-for foray into a land that my contemporaries have no ken of? The last of my youthful expectation of a long life yawning rosily in front of me has been stripped away, along with my fertility, my sharp memory and my eyesight. I am now biologically aged well ahead of my years. But I hope that, along with being so much older now than I was two years ago, my wisdom has grown in equal measure.

I hope the experience informs my compassion for the invisible stories and strength of people who walk among us, changed by their own unexpected detours. I hope it feeds that still place of presence and kindness towards my own self. I hope it makes me greedy for the joy of a life well lived, moment by moment. And I hope it spills out into the world in unexpected and delightful ways, transformed by the sharing of it.