Trapped in My Body
How Can You Win the Battle and the War of Cancer—and Everyday Life?
At the end of the day, I just want to escape my body. Pestered by dogged discomforts, I squirm, groan, and complain. Tautness in my chest, irritation from the PICC line tapping my nerves, bulgy bloating, not to mention the effects of chemo, wear me down. My fifth UTI in 2+ months with more antibiotics and news of possible abdominal surgical complications bring me to the edge of a long-delayed cry. (I find out much later that the bloating is due to a feisty intestinal issue called SIBO, not surgical complications.) I try to walk it off or move to a more comfortable spot, but there’s no relief. I feel raw, tense, oversensitive. Several months after my surgeries, still wedged to vexing pain, I struggle to find my balance.
A pile-up of small stuff—unforeseen and invisible—erodes my defenses. A floodgate of bottled-up emotions opens up and pushes out hot tears, quietly at first, then in-full-force. Until now the battle was so intense that I couldn’t cope if I gave into the tears. I also didn’t want to lose the only hair I had left, my eyelashes.
I’m fighting a mental battle, though it feels mostly like a physical one. There’s a vast gap between expectation and reality, how I appear and how I feel. There’s pressure to be fine when I’m not fine, pressure from people and myself. From the outside things may look fine, from the standpoint of time removed from surgery, things should be fine. People often remark how “good” I look for what I’ve gone through. I appreciate the compliments, but they also frustrate me. People forget I’m tethered to my body, focused on pain. They naturally expect and hope for improvement and progress, not intending to apply pressure, but their expectations breed a fear of moving into the category of “chronic,” a place of non-healing, a purgatory of pain. There’s also the pressure I put on myself. I dislike being dictated to by my body and expect to feel better by now. I don’t want to be a complainer, one of “those” people that others gradually avoid. Happy, healthy people are more fun to be around.
Sometimes it’s not the big crisis of cancer that gets me down, but the small stuff. It is then that the journey feels incredibly long with no end in sight. Faith flickering and patience thinning, I get sucked me into a vortex of spiraling negativity.
Why does it seem easier—at least more straightforward—to fight the battle of chemo than the war of cancer? The Pyrrhic victory of winning the battle but losing the war is a famous mental model. Is it possible that we are better equipped for battles because they are well-defined, measurable, and limited in scope? Maybe we feel like we have more control over battles. So, we prepare and marshal our resources for a concentrated effort. While fighting a battle, however, we underestimate the scope and demands of war. Wars cover more area and involve more foes; sometimes wars drag on without an end in sight. We can win the battle but lose the war.
So, how do we win the battle and the war? By recognizing that the war of cancer—and of everyday life—is a war of the mind. By tolerating discomfort and a loss of control. By knowing that war will surprise us with unforeseen foes. By being prepared to fight and never give up. By accepting the reality that most of our troubles stem from the mental toll of small, recurring, persistent, and insolvable puzzles and troubles.
This mindset allows me to filter out toxic thoughts and desires, the most noxious being questions about the future, which dislodge my focus on the present. Questions like “When is this over?” or “When will I return to normal?” are counterproductive, and I pull myself back to the moment, the hour, the day as a way of embodying the imperative “Give us this day our daily bread.” Living a day at a time becomes more than a cliché but the most important coping strategy. I look at the tasks and gifts of each day and refuse to look ahead. The tasks are my daily burdens, puzzles, and problems and the gifts are the small blessings, unexpected and fresh, that rain on each day. This strategy helps me wrestle with toxic thoughts, take control of my responses, and live in gratitude. Paradoxically, this battle strategy also helps me fight the war.
From the cancer patient to the everyday person with everyday problems, we all share a similar challenge of coping with the incessant head noise of aggravations that nag, sap, rankle, and deplete us.
We are earthen vessels. Will we crack or hold up under fire?