When people hear that I’m in remission, they get a vision in their head of “life getting back to normal”. I know because that was the vision in my head, and those are the words the oncologist said to me.
My cancer has been in remission for several months now, and for most of the month of July (while my family was on our trip to Europe), I felt like the vision of remission was being realized in me. I was not completely free from all the physical challenges related to the cancer that I’d faced for 18 months, but I felt stronger than I had in a very long time, and was hoping that this trip would be a springboard for the active life I had been waiting and working for.
Immediately after the trip I had all the tests and scans that needed to be done for the “One-year post-transplant” milestone. It wasn’t a fun 10 days, but all my bloodwork, bone-marrow biopsy, scans, etc came back showing the cancer was in deep remission. Amazing news.
I was going to have a busy late summer and fall and pick up where I had left off when the cancer hit: family events and outings, a lot of catching up on yard work, a bit more travel, creating, being “myself” again.
Unfortunately, I began having a daily dose of difficulties, including muscle, joint and bone pain, fatigue, GI issues, neuropathy, cognitive, and other problems. Before I could get a handle on one problem, the next setback would come. Sometimes the complaints came one at a time, and sometimes in a stinky, skunk-cabbage bouquet of struggles. Sometimes it is just a nuisance, but very often, it’s been a nightmare.
The doctors can’t find a cause, except “post stem cell transplant complications”. Don’t get me wrong, I have great doctors. They’re working hard to find explanations and solutions. And I’m being persistent and working hard to help myself. But the progress is slow or non-existent, and so far five months out, no answers are on the horizon.
I asked my oncologist a while ago if I had peaked in Europe. She said, “No. We’ll get you back to feeling well again.”
I don’t know how many cancer patients in remission can tell the same story. Probably most of them. It’s been a tough one to put on the page. I want to focus on the blessings, and I hate, hate, hate being pitied. But this is the reality that I and many people face. Remission is not the vision I had.
But I have discovered something really important in the months of enduring and wondering.
Unfulfilled expectations are a part of every life. They are, in fact, one of the most important and potentially transformative parts of every life. I’ve had to face the idea that life may never be “normal” again. It’s an unpleasant thought, and one that I’ve struggled with and had to learn about a little at a time, over a lot of time. It’s been months of “waiting for the other shoe to drop” and “picking myself up and dusting myself off”. But the time passes, and I’m learning to feel differently about it, and enduring as well as I can.
“True enduring represents not merely the passage of time, but the passage of the soul. By itself, of course, the passage of time does not bring an automatic advance. Reflection and introspection require time. So many spiritual outcomes require saving truths to be mixed with time, forming the elixir of experience; that sovereign remedy for so many things. Without patient and meek endurance we will learn less, see less, feel less, and hear less.” (Neal A. Maxwell)
I was really blessed to have 60 years of the life I expected to have. And now I’m extraordinarily blessed to have a different kind of life; a life filled with things of eternity.
Neal Maxwell also taught, “Righteous sorrow and suffering carve cavities in the soul that will become later reservoirs of joy.”
As time passes, and I have made decisions to find joy in different things, I am discovering a level of happiness that I never realized existed. In spite of it all, or more accurately, because of it all, I am really, truly happy.