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You never forget the day or the moment
The world seems to stand still once you are told,
Especially when it is not something you expect.
You had gone to the hospital for a postoperative complication, a possible fluid collection.
Not to be told the scariest words doctors can say: tumor, a solid lesion, a mass, the possibility of…
CANCER.
Even though you think you are prepared for anything,
no one is prepared for that word at any time, no matter who they are.
Instantly, you become a patient, who is just as scared as any
other patient but who knows more than most other patients,
which now is not a good thing.
All that knowledge becomes your worst enemy as
you wait first for evaluations by specialists and then a confirmatory diagnosis.
While most patients are looking on the Internet for information,
you are poring over the latest medical journals and
physician websites for information on the possible
type of cancer and the statistics about those cancers, and this
becomes the scariest part of all as you wait for treatment.
The tricks your mind starts to play on you.
You automatically assume the worst because physicians are taught to prepare patients.
You wonder and hope that you will be in the survival group.
You begin to pray for contained disease, no lymphatic invasion, and no metastatic disease, or maybe a miracle or a benign tumor.
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All the while, deep down in the pit of your stomach, you think
CANCER, I KNOW IT IS CANCER.
Two and half months later, it is confirmed.
This is the one time as a physician you wish you were wrong.
At times we all get that hunch we cannot explain,
it is going to be a certain diagnosis, and then it is that
diagnosis and normally you trust that hunch. But this time you wish that hunch was wrong, but it is not. You
have joined the millions of others, you have CANCER. The six-letter word that I believe now really should have been a four-letter word. The minute you say it, nothing else matters.
It changes your life. Whether contained or not, you can never go back.
Survivors are who we are.
We are in an exclusive club that no one wants to join. But once we join, we feel an instant bond with all the other people who have been
given that horrible one-word diagnosis. I did
not understand this before, but now that I too have joined the club, I get it.
Survivors see the world just a little bit differently.
Bad days are not as bad and good days are a little brighter because we understand days can be taken away in an instant.
Mortality has been shown to us, and that has awakened us, allowing us to appreciate the littlest things in life.
We physicians work so hard taking care of our patients that sometimes we forget that we may have to look at medicine from the other side of the tracks.
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