The Rantings & Ravings of a Cancer Patient

I read that there were five stages to grief – 

• denial or shock and disbelief; 
• anger; bargaining; 
• guilt or depression; 
• acceptance  
• hope

Each person doesn’t follow the same sequence, and some people circle back to an earlier stage. 

I’ve definitely gone through stage one. I was in denial, shock and disbelief in 2017 when I was first diagnosed and again in 2018 when the cancer came back. I’ve experienced some guilt, asking myself if I could have caused my cancer.  Maybe I’d been working too hard and not getting enough sleep. Maybe it was the steaks that I’d eaten a few times that year. Perhaps I hadn’t been taking care of myself the way I should have. The depression stage is a part of me that I can’t seem to shake. It’s always there in the background, waiting to take over. I think right now, I am experiencing a mixture of the anger and depression.

I have such a hard time coping with the reality of my life as it is right now. Everything has changed. EVERYTHING – even how I relate to myself. Cancer has changed how I view the people around me too. There is so much loss. For one thing, I’ve lost my health – I’ll never be the healthy person that I once was. I have lost my ability to work, so theloss of income and these stupid bills from treatment, leave me with no financial stability. I have lost my breasts, my hair, and the feeling in different parts of my body. Even my memory has been affected. There are so many negative impacts of cancer, andI don’t see any of the positive.

So yeah, I’m grieving and mourning. I grieve pretty much every day and to be honest, on most days I’m also angry as Hell. I mourn for the old me, my old life, my old abilities. When I look at pictures of myself before cancer, I get so sad because I’m no longer that person and can’t do the things that person was able to do. The fact that I will never be who I was prior to cancer or be able to live and work as I once did saddens me beyond belief.

My therapist tells me that I have to find what makes me happy and chart my own path. The problem is, I no longer know what makes me happy. What made me happy in the past doesn’t even interest me now. How do you find your new happy? How do you even begin to search for it?

Sometimes I feel that what I really want to do is sleep. Sleep so I don’t have to deal with my reality. I feel so tired. Tired of thinking about it, tired of going to the doctor’s office, tired of taking meds, tired of being in pain, just tired. I just want to sleep and wake up when this is all over.