Today is a Sunday musing around language and the energy that creates.
As regular readers know, I recently had cancer. It was diagnosed on March 3rd, and then successfully removed via a major operation on March 31st. I then recovered well over the next 7-8 weeks such that I was ready to start “insurance” chemo (to help further reduce the risk of any recurrence. That will finish with my final tablets on August 4th, so that will mark the end of that particular health journey in five months from start to finish.
At the beginning, I adopted a context of GRATITUDE, as I wrote about on March 23rd post-diagnosis, and pre-op, then again on May 3rd after a six-week hiatus from my daily posts. As I started chemo, though, it soon felt that I needed a shift in Context to ACCEPTANCE, something I then wrote about on June 3rd.
Linked to this, on March 16th I wrote “Hold your thoughts likely“, focussed on the power of being unattached. I’d note that later that day I had the meeting with the surgical team, 13 days after preliminary diagnosis, where I was to find out my full surgical prognosis. As I waited at the hospital, the surgeon was about twenty minutes late for our meeting. I found it almost amusing that I was still able to sit there waiting calmly to hear the news that could vary from the “routine, just tough” to, well, it could have been way worse. I’m not always zen, but somehow I was then.
This last piece of being UNATTACHED is very much linked to ACCEPTANCE and also GRATITUDE. I also feel it is critical, as part of having had cancer, no matter the risk of recurrence calculated by the medical team, is that it could come back later. I care very deeply about being around leading a healthful live for decades to come, and at the same time i seek to be unattached to that should circumstances change.
Those are some thoughts on my health journey, and now a few thoughts on the power of language.
I am healthy, I am well. Though I ingest chemo drugs that make me feel sick and fatigued, they are part of me having the opportunity to continue to be well and lead a healthful life.
I am accepting of what is and unattached to what will be, I am also grateful in many ways.
I am not, however, “fighting”, I am not “being brave”. This is not a win-or-lose battle, it is a health journey for me. I do happen to have had a very early stage cancer that was routine to remove as well as to add a chemo protocol to. For that, I am grateful, even though it has been very tough at times.
Should I have more difficult health journeys in future I hope and feel I would be as able to adopt a positive attitude including gratitude, acceptance and being unattached. I find these to be powerful, positive and healthy. Those are my language choices and they work for me. Others may choose to “fight cancer” or even say “f*** cancer”, The energy that language creates may well work for others, but it would not work for me. I feel that cancer cells are simply doing what they do. I don’t know how they got into my system, simply that I and the doctors and nurses are doing what we do on the journey of a healthful life.