Cancer, Good News And Maintaining An Even Strain

What do you do when you get some good news?

Punch the air?

Jump for joy?

Open a bottle of bubbly?

Probably all three and who can blame you?!

The thing is, with cancer, it’s not that simple.

Celebration is an event, not a destination.

You might be told that you latest CT scan shows that the cancer hasn’t grown.

You might be told that your cancer is stable and your treatment is holding things at bay.

You might be told that the tumour is shrinking.

You might get the news that there is No Evidence of Disease (NED).

What’s not to celebrate here?

It’s a tricky.

Celebrating little wins and big wins is high octane fuel for hope, optimism and positivity.

But I for one have never been comfortable with getting carried away with so-called good news.

I had Stage IV head and neck cancer once and then many years later, it came back and was then told it was incurable.

With cancer, you are never really out of the woods.

We all respond in a way that suits us.

A phrase that seems to fit the cancer experience for me is ‘maintain an even strain’.

This is another way of saying stay grounded, keep it together and don’t get too excited.

It almost sounds pessimistic to adopt this line of thinking like you’re expecting things to come back.

But it isn’t like that.

With cancer you are always looking over your shoulder and forever on your guard.

Things can, and do, change very quickly and there’s always this niggle at the back of your mind that there’s always at least a very slight risk of recurrence even if you are 10 years + down the line as I was.

As a cancer survivor, I have never been complacent and never taken a day for granted.

It used to be said that getting to the 5 year point was where you could be called ‘cured’ but doctors don’t say that now.

Getting the ‘all clear’ and being told you are ‘cancer-free’ is almost reckless because no one can definitely say that 100%.

That’s not something that can be measured as not all cancer cells can be detected. Cancer-free does not mean cure.

I really do understand why some people celebrate a ‘cancerversary‘ because as time goes by, each one is a significant milestone and it’s a moment to survey the many paths we’ve traversed and the mountain we’ve climbed.

But I think we have to tread carefully and temper our partying when it comes to commemorating survivorship as there will always be another mountain to climb.

It’s just being sensible, maintaining a balance and adhering to the “one day at a time” tenet.

There is no hard and fast rule about what to do when it comes to this. What matters most is that you continue to define cancer in ways most meaningful to you.

For me, celebrate the day sure but my advice is don’t touch the money!