Living With Cancer: Finding Calm in the Storm
By SUSAN GUBAR
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Every Sunday evening, I phone a friend in another college town who has not yet found a cancer support group in her community. Let’s call her Melanie. Melanie had recovered from surgery and completed chemotherapy. Physically, she had gained strength. Yet she continued to feel overwhelmed by negative thoughts.
“Is it possible to escape the terrifying sandstorms of fear and anxiety?” she asked after we discussed the inefficacy of her antidepressant. Probably not, I thought, but surely we can find oases of respite and reprieve.
Melanie had been reading “Women Who Think Too Much,” a title that initially put me off. Like “Women Who Worry Too Much” and “Women Who Love Too Much,” it seemed to blame women for being (you guessed it, we’ve heard it before) “too much.” But the book, by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, offered my friend a number of pragmatic ways to distract herself from recurrent worries and keep stressful “overthinking” from spiraling out of control.
For men as well as women, cancer and its treatments often set off torrents of self-criticism, ruminations about what went wrong, recriminations aimed at others, obsessive dread of making medical decisions and of incapacities in a tattered present and a fraught future. Feelings of worthlessness, or worse, of being a damaged and damaging burden, breed depression. From Professor Nolen-Hoeksema, my friend had learned some useful strategies to help her interrupt the injurious scenarios repeating in her head.
Of course I was positive about efforts to stymie negativity, even though I am sometimes wary of the feel-good-in-a-minute guarantees of alternative approaches. So I affirmed all of Melanie’s efforts and started considering my own alternatives to alternative approaches — which I offer here not to supplant but to supplement the breathing, meditation, visualization, massage and exercise routines in many self-help books. While cancer proves that we cannot control our bodies, my support group continually reminds me, we can try to guide our minds and spirits.
1. Plan and make a dinner for three vegans. You will be thinking about, buying ingredients for and preparing labor-intensive foods like sweet potatoes topped with black bean chili, avocado pesto on pasta, mushroom barley soup, aloo gobi, falafel or spicy tomato lentil stew.2. Arrange a play date with your favorite child for a marathon board game or series of card games or a session of seed-planting or painting.3. Because of the web, retail therapy works even if you cannot go out to shop, but I prefer Scrabble via Facebook with far- flung relatives.4. Lie down on top of your beloved or have your beloved lie down on top of you, or lie next to each other. This one came from Melanie, and I know it works. I will only add that it can also, of course, be done with a pet.5. Have a glass of cabernet, a jigger of single-malt Scotch, or a hot toddy at 5 p.m. There is a reason drink time comes at the close of the day, when waning light causes us to brood over nightfall. Or start the other great opiate: a novel.6. A long television series like “Friday Night Lights” can do wonders, though the writers of “Breaking Bad” may have fallen back on the dubious metaphor of cancer as a corrosive social canker: not only is the central character motivated to make meth to pay for treatment but cancer also represents the malignancy that has turned Walt Whitman’s America into the violent society inhabited by Walt White.7. Nothing is more addictive than the sort of repetitive behavior associated with knitting, sewing, woodworking, purging closets, practicing a musical instrument, or even (for some) ironing.8. Consider a mantra: “I am safe right now.” (This one came from Melanie.) Or “Don’t leave before you leave.” (This one is recycled from Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” by a member of my support group.) Or if you are more vindictive: “Screw cancer.”9. Sign up with a volunteer organization that helps feed the hungry or provides medical help to the indigent or supports at-risk schoolchildren or offers shelter to the homeless.10. Lie down by yourself or with a partner or a pet (maybe with that glass of cabernet or Scotch) and listen to the late Beethoven quartets or Billie Holiday or the Beatles.
There are surely other ways to come to terms with these storms, which are, after all, part of the human condition. For me that week, a Sunday night phone conversation with Melanie served as an oasis.
To you, my darling friend who knows yourself to be Melanie: now that you are facing a recurrence and grimmer odds, I beg in this embarrassingly public forum what I entreat privately. Please find a way to tarry among us. May my lame list exasperate you sufficiently to come up with more havens. And let’s talk again . . . and then again.
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