Will I Be Alive In 16 Months? (How To Handle Fear & Anxiety After Cancer)
Every day at dusk I take a walk around my neighborhood along winding horse trails and golden meadows filled with wildflowers. An occasional pine tree offers a sweet smell that reminds me of my childhood. As I contemplate my serene surroundings, I suddenly think “I wonder if I’ll be dead next year?”
If you didn’t know already, I just finished cancer treatment and my particular cancer is rather nasty. The average disease-free survival time is 16 months, while five-year survival hovers around seven to ten percent. The keywords here being “disease-free”, as in women who were told they were “cancer-free”, but died anyway.
What do you do when the average time to death is 16 months? How do you live for a year and a half cancer-free just to be thrown back down the rabbit hole of depression, and anxiety? I think about recurrence almost daily — as I’m sure many cancer survivors do.
When you have cancer there can be a bit of reliance on prognosis rates for peace of mind. If ninety percent of people survive it helps you sleep better at night — but what about the ten percent who died? I think about them too. Good prognosis rates couldn’t save their lives.
So when you have a cancer in which most people die, survival is not an impossible dream but it sure feels like a Hail Mary is needed to get there. And instead of relying on prognosis rates for peace of mind, you avoid them like the plague, needing a line of separation between yourself and the data points that represent human life.
I, personally, don’t want to be a case study on PubMed (“a 34-year-old female presented with late-stage small-cell neuroendocrine in October 2019”), or “that girl who people once knew”. But I don’t know how to separate the reality of my situation with the fact that I’m an individual — not a data point — and could survive. In fact, sometimes when I receive a “congrats” on my cancer-free scans a little piece of me shudders because I wonder if that person will have to come to my funeral. How do I reconcile the fact that the average time to death is sixteen months for everyone else, with a hope and expectation that my life will be saved? How do I live without fear?
Living without fear is the biggest mental battle for me right now. I can change my diet, I can cut out the sugar, I can lower my IGF-I levels, I can intermittently fast, I can increase my Vitamin C intake, I can drink my mushroom tea, I can look up complementary therapies, I can do East-West medicine, I can have an oncology team full of people who have the best degrees, but the one thing I can’t have is peace of mind. No one can tell me if I will live cancer-free for longer than the women who came before me. By the time sixteen months approaches I’ll have completed five clear scans. Can you imagine? Five perfect scans followed the worst news of your life? The doctors expected it, the data predicted it, but you in your delusional world really thought you would be the one to make it. The one to survive. How naive can you be? Suddenly, the doctors begin discussing palliative care, and your freedom flashes before your eyes. Playtime is over, the slow crawl to death begins.
I’ve read the literature I’ve seen the numbers I know what happens to the women whose cancer comes back. Selfishly, I don’t want to be them. I don’t want to suffer. In this case, ignorance would be bliss, because either I’m in the bucket of people who survive or I’m not and there’s simply no way to know. My only option is to take life one day at a time (like everyone else) and if I get 16 months cancer free I’ll be grateful and if I get 60 months cancer free I’ll be grateful.
So as I walk across these winding dirt roads, the same roads I traversed as a child, I am overcome with nostalgia. The people, places, and moments that make up “my life” are laid out in front of me. And I hope to set foot upon this road in sixteen months, still cancer-free as the survivor I — perhaps deusionally — knew I could be.
