Another biopsy. A surgery.

Fatigue, bone-wearying fatigue, the kind where you barely make it work every day and want nothing but sleep.

A test. Another biopsy, followed by a two-week lapse into the border on despair.

A visit to an internal specialist, a work-up, a second opinion, allergy testing. A surprise ending from the second opinion – there’s nothing to worry about, the first doctor’s approach was aggressive and had severely overtreated me.

Just like that. Release. A clean bill of health.

The soul-tired feeling fell away within a few days… it took some time to sink in, but once it did my heart felt so light. Finally, finally my shoulders relaxed. I think they had been hunched for months, the constant companion of sad and tired eyes.

The actual tired feeling, it turns out, is the result of chronic untreated allergies. I am allergic to dust mites, mold, cat hair, trees, soy and wheat. I started medication immediately.

It’s only been a day, but already the constant fog has lifted. I have energy. Energy I wondered if I would ever have again – energy to blog, to read, to talk, to do laundry – even after a full day of work.

I have energy.

It’s true that you don’t know how valuable things are until they are gone. The nights I would cry out of frustration and exhaustion were more and more frequent. I had, ironically, spent a year trying to figure out how to not pack my schedule, only to find somewhere in the middle that I couldn’t do what I had been used to doing even if I wanted to.

But now it’s back. I have energy.

And I get to start again. I can start from here.

Photo credit: basegreen via Flickr.

I buried my feet in the sand and thought about what she was suggesting. “All I’m saying, Holly,” she said, “is that you might want to take it a little easy. Maybe you just slow down this year. Don’t make any big changes. Don’t move, don’t change jobs, don’t start any companies, don’t take on anything extra besides work. Just be for a while.”

Who wouldn’t want to be told to do less, I wondered. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to be lazy? And there it was. Right there. Lazy. Kicking ass at a full-time professional job, being in a wonderful committed relationship, writing two blogs, and founding a professional organization is lazy? I’ve always pushed myself to be more, better, faster. If I wasn’t the only person doing it, I’d better be the youngest person doing it. If younger people were doing it, I was doing more.

I’ve been teetering back and forth on whether or not the women in my family have bodies that are just not equipped to handle stress, or if we put an extraordinary amount of stress on ourselves which affects our bodies. Two of my aunts have battled cancer, breast and brain. My mother was emitted to the E.R. with chest pains for the first time at 42. The pre-cancerous cells my surgery and biopsy had revealed were most likely the result of stress, my doctor warned me in her office.

I had my first nervous breakdown as a high school junior. I was working part-time, volunteering in an at-risk school, going to school full-time, taking 4 Advanced Placement courses, and taking a night class at the local college. I crumpled like a ball in the living room when my mom scolded me over the laundry. It didn’t really slow me down though. By my senior year I was going to the local college full-time in place of high school classes, with the same extracurricular schedule. Who was I if not all those things – a star student, an impressive application/ resume, a good employee, a girl on the make?

So maybe that’s why I wasn’t surprised when my doctor eyed my chart after the second round of biopsies and said that the past three months of low-stress living hadn’t made a difference. Hadn’t I spent most of those three months stressing out about how to maintain my immense checklist of “low-stress” things to do? Wasn’t it only the last few weeks where I let myself go to whatever the results were, left it in Something Larger’s hands?

One painful, frightening surgery later (which I had um, postponed by a month so I could launch a professional organization), I sat next to my equally driven mother and took her words of advice. She knew. She was still pushing and climbing at 50. “It’s always there,” she said of ambition. “It’ll be there in a year.”

Who am I if not a ladder-climbing employee, a twenty-something entrepreneur, a moonlighting freelancer, The Person in Town Who Knows About That, a woman on the make?

I guess I’m a woman taking it easy.

Tempering my ambition and drive is something I’ve got to figure out in my life, otherwise this thing, this cancer is just going to keep coming up. And the risks are just too great to ignore.

And while I made up my mind on the beach that day, it wasn’t until today I had to act on it. I turned down a $500/mo. freelance gig. And it was in a type of work that I love and have wanted to do more of. I even initially agreed, but backed out after a long talk with my boyfriend and lots of prayerful contemplation this weekend. It was probably one of the hardest things, besides the surgery, I’ve had to do this year.

My greatest fear in giving up this year to maintaining the life I already have is that I will miss out on something, some opportunity, some chance, some big life-changing event. Then I realize that I just went through the life-changing event. I came head-to-head with so many fears over the six months I endured biopsies, waiting periods, immune system boosters, and surgery. In the end, if I don’t learn how to slow down and enjoy what I’ve built, I’ll miss out on so much more.

The past 6 months have been an emotional rollercoaster as I faced the possibility of cancer and potentially damaging my child-bearing abilities. I had an amazing amount of support, not only from my loved ones and friends, but also from my friends in the blogosphere.

Let me say first that there is no wrong way to support a friend. But a health crisis can send a person into an emotional tailspin of anger, fear and loneliness. Here are a few things I learned along the way.

Don’t say: Lots of people go through it.
When I heard this (which was often since lots of women do have this surgery), it made my feelings seem insignificant. While it is soothing to some degree to know that you’re not going into completely uncharted medical territory, it is the first time for you and it shouldn’t be trivialized.

Do say: Here’s the contact information for someone who has gone through it.
I can’t count how many times people told me they knew someone who had the same surgery and how she was fine. But that didn’t lessen my fears. Great. Someone, somewhere has come out OK. Doesn’t help.

A few days before my surgery, a woman called me and said that she’d had the same surgery, although it had been 20-someodd years since. She told me exactly what she went through, from beginning to the end. That was the first time I felt comfortable.

So much of what we fear as humans is simply the unknown. The more firsthand information I acquired, the more at ease I felt. After my surgery, a few more women stepped forward and said they’d had it also. I wished that they had done so earlier.

Don’t say: There are people who’ve gone through worse.
I heard this a few times, and when I did, it made feel like total crap. Not only was I (still) facing surgery, but here I am feeling sorry for myself while children in Africa are dying of hunger and disease. Thanks for the helping of guilt – it goes great with my anxiety and fear.

Do say: Let me share my experience going through something worse.
Unless you’re the person who has gone through something worse, I wouldn’t touch this one. If you can’t offer sympathy, don’t offer guilt in its place. If you have faced a bigger challenge, then please share your experience.

An older gentleman friend of mine faced (and beat) cancer three times. Another girlfriend beat a brain tumor. Two of my aunts have in recent years survived breast and brain cancer. Having watched these people walk through their ordeals with grace and talked to them about their fears, where they found strength and courage, and how they coped, were invaluable lessons.

Don’t say: Keep your chin up.
The thing about clichés is that we don’t hear their meanings anymore. Our mind sort of glosses over them because we’ve heard them so much. Besides, who wants to keep their metaphorical chin up when they feel a punch coming?

Do say: Keep your shoulders back.
This is a challenge you’re facing, and you should be in full-on attack mode. It was hard to feel self-pity, sadness, fear, or weakness when I remembered to physically round my shoulders back and down. It made me feel strong, powerful, like I was ready for a fight. It’s sort of like the moment a runner laces her shoes up – her body is ready for the run. By keeping my shoulders back, I was ready to face my challenges head-on.

Don’t say: Don’t worry.
I know this is what people say when they’re searching for the right thing to say and it just isn’t coming. People who love us desperately want to see us feeling better, faster. And it seems like anytime someone said this to me, they were willing it with all their might to take the worry away from me. But someone in a crisis is going to worry. I felt like people were trying to shut me up sometimes, like closing their eyes to an ugly house in the neighborhood.

Do say: Tell me what you’re worried about.
I realize that my loved ones don’t want to think about the worst-case scenarios anymore than I do, but I needed to talk about what I was worried about. Would it be cancer? What if I can’t have children? What if something goes wrong in the surgery?

One of my tricks for beating fear is naming the monster. I ask myself what the worst-case scenario outcome is. That usually takes the fangs off a fear. I needed to be able to do that with someone close to me, to get it off my chest. My moods were so effected by my fears, that I would burst into tears at the breakfast table. “Don’t worry” ain’t gonna fix that. Talking it through will.

Don’t say: Everything will be fine.
This is a lot like “don’t worry” in that I think people say it when they have nothing else to say. I usually just sort of shook my head in agreement or mumbled a thank-you. It just doesn’t really say anything.

Do say: I’m praying for you, or I’m holding you in my thoughts.
While “you’re in my prayers/thoughts” sounds kind of clichéd, this is probably one of the things that warmed my heart the most and actually made me feel better when people said it. It told me that they cared, were thinking about me, and were offering to do the one thing they could actually do – pray for my well-being or send “good vibes” my way.

Even when I was an atheist, I welcomed people’s prayers in a crisis. I took a class in college about the mind-body connection and read about studies in which cancer patients who had an assigned prayer group praying for them survived at higher rates than control groups that did not have a prayer group. I believe in the power of lots of people sending positive thoughts and wishes for you into the universe.

My rollercoaster ended on Monday when my doctor declared me cancer-free. If I can learn to remove the stress in my life, I’ll (hopefully) never have to face it again. But that’s another post…

Photo courtesy My Lyn via Flickr.

I like hamburgers. A lot. I have a thing for classic American food, like fried chicken, milk shakes, and French fries. I love McDonalds. And I’ve been known to down four Red Bulls one right after the other and still yawn at the end of the night. I don’t sleep enough. I push my schedule to the limits, suffering small breakdowns, edging out relaxing activities, and parsing out tiny increments of time to family once a quarter.

What I’d been doing was waiting until tomorrow for well, everything. I’ll just have a hamburger today, tomorrow I’ll eat healthier. I’ll see my family next weekend, when work is less stressful. I’ll start leaving the office sooner after this quarter is over; I’ll take a do-nothing day sometime later, once my business is off and running.

We treat life like bottomless chips and salsa – there will always be more when we run out.

Somewhere around the time Date #4 and I were splitting up, I got some unexpected news from my doctor. I needed a biopsy. I’ve had two biopsies in the past and some minor surgery to catch some low-level growth on my cervix before it progressed. No big deal. So I had the biopsy and waited, rather impatiently, for the results over the long Thanksgiving weekend. [I'd like to note that Date #4 drove me to and from my appointment and took amazing care of me. He even baked cookies.]

My doctor’s office called and said the results were normal. No abnormal cell growth. But we want you to come in and talk to the doctor anyway. Sure, sure. Great. No worries. I hang up the phone.

Wait.

Why does the doctor want to see me if everything is fine? My sister the nurse reassures me. “She probably just wants to talk to you about getting everything back to normal and keeping it that way,” she said.

Instead, my doctor tells me that the biopsy was normal. For my outer cervix. What that means is not that there are no problems – it means that they are deeper. In fact, the problem is so deep that the kind of biopsy required could compromise my ability to carry a pregnancy to term. [I assume by now I’ve lost most of my male readers.]

I had a decision to make. I could move forward with the more invasive biopsy, which will require hospitalization. Or, I could wait and see. Sometimes these things can go away on their own, my doctor tells me.

The bargain I strike goes something like this: I have three months to boost my immune system and then I have another test. In the meantime, I run the risk that the growth, which we know nothing about, is bigger or faster-growing than we think.

I’d like to say that things have changed in my life since that day. That I’ve learned the fine art of doing nothing, as one of my retired friends likes to say. That I’ve slowed down, eat healthy, exercise regularly, and am on the whole less stressed.

Pretty much the opposite is true.

I’ve read a lot about cancer and seen the effects of stress on family members and their health. I took a class in college all about how our minds and bodies are connected. I know that the more I believe I will be fine, the more likely I will be. But what a mind-screw.

What’s happened instead is that every time I realize how stressed out I am, I think, “Oh great. I just gave myself cancer.” And then I get more stressed out. Because what if I do want to have kids? What if the partner I haven’t even met yet wants kids? What if I freaking have cancer? And the lump in my throat grows.

Every one around me tells me it’s not a big deal; lots of women go through this. Yes, I know. But it’s not your ability to bear children, is it? I always think. It’s not you with the crap medical insurance in the hospital, is it?

And I stop and realize that none of this is helping. It’s actually making it worse.

Here’s what I should be doing, and my hope is that by putting it out here I can somehow make this next month go the way it needs to. Because in some sense, my life depends on the way I live.

Physical elements
Eating right – Cut out the crap. Insert the fresh. I prefer to eat six small meals throughout the day, and already have a meal plan for this. Guess what’s not on it? Fast food or junk food. It’s all about the many colors of veggies and fruits, with a healthy dose of lean proteins and whole grains. Bring it on.

No caffeine – I love my lattes. I was able to cut out caffeine for three weeks before I caved into Starbucks, aka the monkey on my back. It’s a comfort thing for me, and thus I won’t cut it out all together. Once a week shouldn’t hurt. But I’m glad to say I’m off my three-cup-a-day habit. I can honestly say I have more energy.

Lots of water – Water flushes the body out. By cutting out all other beverages, I realize how little water I would drink otherwise. I also firmly believe my mother’s gorgeous skin is due to her water addiction. It’s all that woman drinks and she’s got the skin of a 25-year-old.

Exercise – Up until the past two weeks, I had a rigorous exercise routine. Three 30-40 minute runs per week, a day of upper-body strength training, a day of lower body and a yoga/cross-training day. This was a good mix for me. The cardio helped my immune system, the strength training builds strong bones (which important for women since we’re prone to osteoporosis later in life – how many of us think of that every day?), and yoga or whatever other physical activity like fishing, kayaking or hiking allows me to be active in my life and enjoy it.

Vitamins – I’ve been taking pre-natal vitamins from the get-go. They boost your immune system like nobody’s business, plus they make your hair and nails grow super fast. It really makes you realize your body is a machine that works harder the more you take care of it. I’ve also been taking calcium (see osteoporosis comment above) and fish oil. I drink Echinacea tea once or twice a day. Hey, man, whatever you say might work, I’ll do it.

Mental
You’ve got to believe you’re going to be OK – This is what everyone tells me, including my doctor. I remember a study from that college course that showed that terminally-ill cancer patients had a higher s
urvival rate if they were in denial than those who accepted their impending death. See also: The Secret.

Keep stress levels low – I have no idea how to do this. I thought perhaps if I could keep my schedule clearer, I would have more downtime and feel less stressed. But that doesn’t seem to work for me. I love all of my activities and have yet to learn the art of saying no. It’s hard to turn down projects when you want to grow your own business, especially when the economy is the way it is and you work in a dying industry. A friend recently told me I needed to embrace this about myself, and that would be the key to unlocking my stress. I do try to have one night a week that is clear of any activity. I spend that evening relaxing with a book, enjoying the quiet. This is definitely my weakest area and I welcome all advice related to this.

Renew – My life coach gave me some tips on how to do this. One is laughter. So I try to be around funny people, laugh at everyone’s jokes, and watch funny movies. It does help. Another is sleep. I try to get 9 hours a night, 8 at a minimum. Being in nature is another, and Date #4 has been kind enough to let me visit his country place out in the Hill Country. It is super relaxing, and I love tromping through the woods with his dogs and lazily kayaking in the river. Anything spiritually-related is good, which I’ll talk about below. Finally, believe it or not, music can be an invigorating activity. I love Explosions in the Sky for inspiring and uplifting me.

Visualization – OK, this is kind of gross, but part of what I do every day is to spend time visualizing a healthy, pink cervix. I even looked up a picture (thanks, Google Images). It looks like a fluffy pink doughnut, basically. I say to myself, I have a healthy, pink cervix. And I imagine it. Weird, I know, but again – I’ll do whatever will work.

Spiritual/Emotional
Faith works – Numerous studies have shown that people who have some kind of belief have higher rates of survival when facing illnesses. I’m not a religious person. To be honest, it just never worked for me. I do consider myself a relatively spiritual person, however. I believe in things like karma and hope reincarnation exists. I think that there’s a reason for things to happen, and I believe that things will turn out the way they’re supposed to. I also think that there is something bigger than binds us all. So, in some sense, I just try to trust that.

Prayer/meditation – In that same college course, I found out that people who had others praying for them generally survived also. I thought this was really interesting. There didn’t have to be a connection between the patient and the prayer-er. I like to think of it as “good vibes.” You’ve got all these good vibes coming in your direction – that’s gotta help, right? Spending quiet time in meditation and prayer also helps center an individual, quiets the mind, and can lower stress levels.

If you’re facing the same situation, I’m not sure what to tell you, except that you aren’t alone. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this. Because even though my friends and family are very supportive and kind, it’s an isolating thing. It makes you question your priorities, your lifestyle, your past decisions. It makes you realize that life is not bottomless, and that the things you feel entitled to, that you take for granted, may not be there in a month.

Photo: Courtesy JPhilipson via Flickr.

We know that eventually this will all pass, that the emotions will subside given time, but what is to be done right now? Isn’t there anything that can be done immediately?

The past few weeks have been difficult for me. I’m going through a break-up, my company laid off 10 percent of our workforce, and I’m oh-so impatiently awaiting medical test results. It seems like when it rains, it pours.

I’m doing everything there is to do – I keep myself busy, surround myself with friends and loved ones, try to extract what I’ve learned about myself, journal, pour myself into work and imagine a bright future. But I have too many moments when I just can’t do anything but burst into tears. The heartbreak is too great; the weight of everything is too much.

I went through very similar emotions when I first got sober. It was all so overwhelming, and when the loneliness became too much to bear I turned to a story a mentor told me. (Everything good I know I learned from someone much wiser than me!)

When she was having a particularly difficult time, she called her mentor and asked her what she ought to do. She was hysterical and went on and on about what she ought to do.

The woman on the other end of the line asked her calmly, “Are your dishes done?”

“What?” the distraught woman asked.

“Are your dishes clean?” the other woman repeated.

“No.”

“Go do your dishes and call me when you’ve finished.” She hung up the phone.

The woman did her dishes and called her mentor back.

“Do you feel better?” the woman asked.

“No,” the distraught woman replied.

“Is your laundry done?” the woman asked.

“No.”

“Go do your laundry and call me when you’ve finished.” She hung up the phone.

This went on for half the day. She did her dishes and laundry, swept and mopped, and dusted. At the end of it, the distraught woman looked around her clean house, finally calm.

The point? Sometimes there’s nothing that can be, or even should be done about the pain in our lives. Someone recently told me, “Holly, the only way is through.” Another wise person once told me that sometimes you just have to stand. There’s nothing to be done about the pain in our lives but to endure it until it passes.

None of us want to experience pain; it’s part of our biological make-up. We avoid pain because it is unpleasant. It is sometimes necessary, however, in order to grow. It’s been my experience that periods of pain directly precede periods of growth. There’s a correlation there. When we avoid it, when we try to cover it up, we often go too far. We’ll develop hardened hearts, character disorders, neuroses, or addictions.

When we can’t do anything to make the pain in our lives dissipate or even pass more quickly, the best thing we can do is to focus on what we can control – our physical environment. I sat in my ridiculously messy car yesterday and decided it was time to clean it. You see, I can’t do anything to fix my emotional messes right now. I have to go through them. But I need to do something, and what I can do is make my environment clean, calm and put-together, even if the rest of me isn’t.

“Doing the spiritual dishes,” as my friend calls it, is a way to distract us temporarily from discomfort and pain, as well as to improve our physical environment. A clean home or apartment will lend some much needed calm to a disquieted mind, whereas a disheveled physical environment will feed negatively into an already chaotic mental environment.

How do you get through the tough periods in life? What are your “spiritual dishes?”

Photo by quinn.anya via Flickr.

It’s been 18 months since I’ve last flown. Before that, I got tanked to get on a plane. We’re talking lots of booze and pills to make it possible. Like, where-am-I-again drunk. Obviously, I don’t have that luxury anymore. And because I value my sobriety, I don’t have the luxury of taking a sweet little anti-anxiety pill any more either. That option went down with the ship.

So, I had to deal with my fear like a normal messed-up person. I went to therapy. My therapist told me something wonderful and amazing and completely rational.

Lean into your fear.

He told me when I was sitting on that flight and I got nervous to take a deep breath, take my left hand, put it on my right hand and pat it reassuringly. Then, he said, physically and mentally lean into your fear.

It worked.

Well, along with a few EMDR sessions. I don’t want to discount that. It was a combination of techniques that got me through this. But it got me thinking about fear, a common thread I’ve come to find in my problems in sobriety. I drank to cover up my fear, and without the drink, the majority of discomfort in my life comes from trying to avoid fear and other negative emotions.

But this isn’t just a common trait among alcoholics, I’ve found. I was just talking to a friend earlier who is in a lot of fear over a big decision in her life. And my life coach just published a post on Brazen Careerist about overcoming your fear to literally rock your life.

As young people, in particular, we’re learning how to recognize our fears and overcome them. This is one such way to do just that. Instead of running away from the things that frighten you, instead of avoiding the uncomfortable situation, instead of not looking into the unknown, lean into your fear.

Get on the airplane and face the fear. You’ll overcome it.

Take the leap and move to a foreign country. You’ll never regret it.

Ask your boss for a raise. You’ll thank yourself.

Have the conversation you’ve been afraid of. You’ll be a better person for it.

Take a deep breath. Pat your own hand reassuringly.

Lean into the fear.

Once you’ve looked into it, it will vanish. And you’ll see it for all it is – fear.

As a friend of mine says, kiss that monster on the nose.