Without warning, the sharp shooting pain causes me to gasp for my next breath. Attempts at deep breathing only exaggerate the level of right-sided pain.
As a cancer survivor, my mind does not casually stop to smell the roses in a sauntering stroll to any possibly harmless cause for this sudden pain. No, my mind does a cheetah-speed race to the conclusion of liver cancer. Maybe stomach cancer. Following the mind's lead, I do the next logically rational thing someone does when diagnosing themselves with a life-threatening disease: I head for the computer to research “symptoms of liver cancer, symptoms of stomach cancer, and causes of right-sided pain.”
Search results indicate right-sided pain is a symptom of liver cancer and stomach cancer. However, I do not have any additional matching symptoms of either. Further research reveals an inexhaustible list of causes for right-sided-pain. Mentally, I run through my immediate course of action options.
See a doctor? Regardless of the shakiness of my justification during daylight hours, if I can, I generally avoid doctors. I am doubly hesitant to make a late night emergency call. As a cancer survivor, I have learned doctors will invariably look for something very wrong. Every symptom means something very serious and the search begins for the something gone terribly wrong.
In the office visits before cancer, the doctor's first response to symptoms of any nature was far less ominous. I miss those days and that life, when tests were done to alleviate anxiety and quiet fear. To prove to the panicked patient the folly of their ways which so often result in the self-inflicted inner terror of self-diagnosis.
Indeed, the last time I experienced the good-old-days was the day the doctor suggested the lump in my breast was “Probably nothing, most times it isn’t anything to worry over but let’s have it checked out.” Right.
Wrong. It was something terribly wrong. It was cancer.
Shortly after the cancer diagnosis, my rational and confidently optimistic mind abandoned me, as did all the practical perspective we had learned together. It takes tremendous effort on my part to pull my mind off this habitual track of post-cancer worst case scenario doom. Approximately the same level of effort required in persuading a trembling-with-tears toddler who is insisting there is a monster lurking in the darkness there is nothing out of the ordinary within the shadows.
Should I wake someone in the family to alert them of this stabbing right-sided pain? No, I am not going to wake the family. My mind will quickly be elected leader of the late night congregation, encouraging them to all follow on the path of doom to the worst possible cause for my right-sided pain. I am not going to allow my mind this opportunity or power.
It is immeasurable, the frustration I feel toward the current workings of my mind and the effort I must make to bring it back to anything resembling hope. I do understand the mind and its functions of gathering knowledge from experience in the collections of memories and associations it makes in defining reality. I do understand cancer terrorized my mind and changed perspective from the upbeat to the hesitant and frightened. I do appreciate there are those rare times when turning on the light does reveal a monster standing in the shadow.
Where the mind generalizes, the higher self is needed, especially when the current experience is being associated with a darker time and the association may be wrong. Time for an antidote. Time for 'The List.'
The List is one of objectivity and gratitude. A tally of all the times when the experiences of life went right. When shadows were empty and the only time anything went horribly wrong happened in the imagination. Gratitude shines bright light in its length.
The list gives the will increasing power over the power of the mind and soon the mind is a muddle of stammering uncertainty of correct conclusions. After the initial hesitations and internal debates, the mind comes around to seeing from a perspective more supportive of life and a quest for living the best possible life. The possibility that living is a possibility. Helps when, with a simple flip of a wall switch, you turn on the light and all the shadows disappear.
While the mind has realigned itself more in harmony with hopefulness, I remain aware the mind needs consistent supervision — attended to and not allowed to run freely of its own accord. There is no telling where hard-earned fear will take it.
As long as there is life, then affirming life is the only framework from which the mind can work that serves life and living. In the mind’s eye of a cancer survivor, where shadows grow every time it gets dark, when shadows truly became monsters, it is the mind that must be reassured of the light that remains shining just beyond the night.
