Filed under: Breast Cancer , Blogs , Cancer Survivors , Survivor Spotlight Almost five years later, the memory is still as vivid as if it were happening now as I tell you that while showering, I discovered a lump in my breast. My hand stopped, my breath caught, and my stomach clenched in terror. Instinctively, I knew I was in trouble. After mammogram, ultrasound, biopsy and the first of three surgeries, the diagnosis of breast cancer was not the most optimistic one. My lobular breast cancer had spread beyond the breast into lymph nodes -- and perhaps elsewhere not yet clearly detected. I would spend the next four years peering over my shoulder, wondering if the shadow of death would visit me with another cancer diagnosis, and if so, where would it settle in this time. If I ate pizza topped with jalapenos for that extra kick of flavor and got a stomach ache, I wondered -- had cancer spread to my liver? If I spent a day met with seemingly endless frustrations and annoyances and got a headache -- had the cancer spread to my brain? While there is nothing rational about these leaps to a cancer conclusion based on evidence suggesting I suffered from logically explainable modern life maladies that antacid or aspirin might easily cure, for the newly-diagnosed surviving breast cancer, it is not uncommon for the mind to immediately race to an impending cancer-based doom for every day aches and pains. I am here to tell you that for the first few years it will be quite normal to have totally unreasonable fears. Not willing to subject myself to this screeching fingernails on the blackboard fear without finding something to muffle the sound, I began creating personal rituals that suggested hope and affirmed life. With each one I was stating the value of my life and staking my claim to my future. For each woman, the personal rituals will be different. Here are a few I created that might give you some ideas for your own: Get down in the dirt. Feel the earth. In the spring and summer, I make time to garden each morning. In the fall and winter, I tend houseplants and kitchen herbs. Planting a seed or tending a plant is one of the most hopeful of acts. I sit on the riverbank and allow myself to become mesmerized by the flowing waters of the river. I go on nature hikes. More than once I have sprawled out on the ground and felt the earth underneath me. If you choose to do this, and I suggest you do try this at least once, it might be best done in the park or backyard because if you lay down, say, in the front yard, someone might call 911 concerned they are witnessing a woman passed out on her front lawn. Make new moon wishes. No, I do not believe the moon has magical powers, but using the timing of a new moon is a way of remembering to make my list, and to add to it each month. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was certainly not done living. There were things I wanted to accomplish, places I wanted to see, knowledge I wanted to explore, milestones I had not marked, finish lines I had not crossed, children who needed my mothering still, grandchildren to look forward to -- but I had never sat and wrote out any of these desires in detail. There is something about getting it down on paper that makes ideas and desires more real. I began making my list. Each month I keep adding to my list. When something on my list happens, I cross it off. Making a list seems to make more things happen. There is magic in that. Start a scrapbook. I stopped and imagined what my perfect life would look like and started drawing pictures of it and cutting out pictures to make collages on each page of the scrapbook. Who am I in my perfect life? Where am I? What am I doing? Who is with me? I add inspirational quotes and personal notations on each page. Any time during the month when I find a picture in a magazine or on the internet or stumble across a meaningful quote that appeals to me, I keep a file to store them until it is time to work on my scrapbook. I work on my scrapbook every full moon. Same principle of reminder and habit of writing my wish list at the new moon. In addition, paying attention to the phases of the moon has helped to reconnect me to the natural cadence and rhythm of nature and time. Honoring myself. Feeling gratitude. When someone tells me no, I look for a yes and walk towards it. This is an act of valuing myself. When someone tells me it cannot be done, I say I am going to go ahead and try. I do not allow myself to be discouraged. This is believing in myself. If someone hurts me, I say ouch. I am an advocate of my emotional well-being. When I first wake up, before I get out of bed, I make a quick mental note of five things I am grateful for before I have a chance to think too much about it. Not surprisingly, the list is primarily the people in my life I love and the fact I woke up. Start a savings account. I know this sounds silly, but having a savings account is a message to myself that I expect to be around for awhile. In the first two years of my breast cancer diagnosis, if a item of clothing became threadbare, I did not buy any clothing to replace it. I did not make any plans beyond the immediate month. I have gotten over that. Now, I can see myself thirty years ahead as a spritely woman with shocking white hair and a twinkle in the eye who lives in a cottage, tends her cottage garden, takes leisurely walks, enjoys visits from children, grandchildren and great-grand children, tells great stories, writes books, and travels when the road beckons. In fact, I have already started to have fun investing in my vision of what my future looks like with -- what else -- a blog about cottage life --a fluid expanding virtual act of my personal expressions of hopefulness. Earlier on, I discovered Rob Brezsny's Pronoia -- the opposite of paranoia and fear -- that suggests adopting a perspective and belief that the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings. Expect blessings. Permalink     Email this     Linking Blogs     Comments

Filed under: Alternative Therapies , Prevention The doctor tells you that you have cancer. Most likely, one of the first things you want to know is how good -- or bad -- your chances are for surviving the cancer. If you do not ask, you will be told when the combination of recommended treatments are discussed with you. It's all about percentages. But what do percentages really mean for you personally? Not much. Cancer is a complex disease, with an equally complex outcome. At this point, you have two choices. You can give up -- feeling like cancer is a death sentence -- or you can decide to believe that your chances are as good as the best predicted percentages ever given to a cancer patient. I really like Deepak Chopra's example of statistics when he compared them to the weather. "If the average temperature in New York City for the year is 54 degrees Fahrenheit, that does not inform me what the temperature is just now or today. Similarly if you are a citizen of Bangladesh and the average income of a Bangladeshi happens to be $65 per household per year, that does not tell me what your personal income is if you happen to be a Bangladeshi." Deepak Chopra, who took part in last year's Blog for Hope , posted that conventional medical doctors often accuse those practicing alternative therapies of nurturing false hope . But Dr. Bernie Siegel states, "There is no such thing as false hope. Either you have hope or you don't!" Doctors are no different than the patient when it comes to choices in attitude about a cancer diagnosis. Some doctors have a hopeful attitude about cancer survivorship, while other doctors seemed resigned to belief that cancer will eventually kill anyone diagnosed with the disease. If you are diagnosed with cancer, no matter the predicted percentage of outcome for your cancer, why not take the high healing road of hope? Because in reality, no one knows what your chances are, and hope has a way of fostering a more positive outcome than an attitude of hopelessness. Hope. Or as Rob Breszny suggests, when deciding what you will choose to believe about life in general, "Pronoia. The opposite of paranoia. Pronoia is defined as the sneaking suspicion that the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings." Expect blessings. Read     Permalink     Email this     Linking Blogs     Comments