Cancer

The words I heard most often from my mother are, “It’s not what you get in life, it’s how you handle what you get.” These words have shaped my life and become the essence of what I believe.

My mother faced so many challenges in her life: the birth of a severely autistic child in the era of blaming mothers for that diagnosis; breast cancer resulting in a mastectomy; a wayward husband and divorce; a serious hand injury following an automobile accident. But somehow she managed to keep her jealousy of others at bay and appreciate her own joys in life.

At first I applied her maxim to relatively minor disappointments, like not making the cheerleading squad or a disappointing test grade. Over time I came to face my own serious challenges in my life: diagnosis with breast cancer twice and endometrial cancer once; major surgeries, radiation and chemotherapy; significant developmental issues with one child and serious health concerns with the other. Through it all, my mother’s words have guided and shaped me.

My experiences have also led me to develop a personal corollary to my mother’s belief. I now believe that, while others can support us in meeting the

It’s 1971 and we are in a green-tinted hospital waiting room, half-sterile, half-filled with sawhorses, wood planks, a drill, sitting in attached sickness-colored plastic chairs. My aunt–my father’s sister, whose ability to exclude herself from experiences by analyzing everyone else has diminished during this mutual terror–is at my right. Her long and elegant fingers cover my own. My younger sister, then brother, mother and older sister are to my left. We wait. It is the eternity of waiting for bad news while hoping for good.

The surgeon enters, scrubs matching walls. He lifts a hand and motions my mother to come to him. My mother grabs my older sister’s hand and moves with the surgeon behind a five-foot high flimsy room divider. Maybe it’s ten feet away from us. Maybe the surgeon really thinks it’s a separate room, closed off ceiling to floor, wall to wall. Asshole, I think to myself. My rage replaces the nausea of waiting. We are invisible to him.

The surgeon’s hand reaches up and pulls off his surgical cap. He’s bald. He’s stooping. He speaks as if we can’t hear. “Your husband has a tumor on his pancreas as big as a grapefruit. It’s inoperable and incurable.”

My

I considered the idea of survival only when I found out, postsurgery, that the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes. I wondered what would have happened had I waited any longer, had I ignored going to the hospital to follow up about the lump on my breast.

“I am grateful for witnessing your courage, your strength is inspiring, your wisdom is eternal, and you are not alone”: These words, written on a paper heart with irises around it, sit on my desk. I feel fortunate to be a behavioral health clinician, providing therapy to patients with cancer who are undergoing radiation at Stanford’s Cancer Center.

I never told my father that his physicians had diagnosed him with pancreatic cancer. Since he was ninety-eight years old, I decided that telling him would only cause him profound mental and emotional anguish—a fear that would diminish however long he had to live but would not alter the reality. To have Dad endure rounds of chemotherapy or radiation at his age would also be physically cruel.

Most of all, I did not tell Dad because not even the doctors were one-hundred percent certain of their diagnosis.

For months, Dad had experienced attacks that left him light-headed and disoriented. By giving him something to drink or eat, I was able to bring him back to reality. Although I told his primary care physician about these frightening episodes, he dismissed them as the concerns of an overly-emotional and loving daughter. Then, while leaving his office after a check-up, Dad had an incident in the waiting room; within minutes, a physician’s assistant had wheeled him to the emergency room.

A multitude of tests led to the rare diagnosis of insulinoma. When Dad’s blood sugar plummeted, he required sugar and/or protein to stabilize him. I had to wake him up every two hours