The Worry Within

Motherhood changes everything. Much like cancer changes everything. From the moment you see a positive sign on a pregnancy test or the moment a lab tech looks at your biopsy, everything changes. All your thoughts, all your expectations and all your worries become consumed by an unknown thing growing inside of you.

And you don't just worry until the baby comes or until the cancer goes. You worry about your children growing up and you worry about the cancer coming back every day for the rest of your life.

I usually dread going to my check-ups at City of Hope. Even if I am feeling 100% healthy, I worry that the X-Ray will reveal something my body has yet to feel.

A few years after I finished treatment, a Pet Scan indicated there was a "hot spot" in the area where I had the cancer. All my worries had come to fruition. As I had thought all along, this cancer was never going away. A few days later, another test showed the first test had been wrong. I was still cancer free. Upon hearing the news, I broke down and sobbed. I couldn't stop crying.

I cried walking out of the office. I cried while my parents made my next check-up appointment. People who walked passed me probably thought I had been told I had 6 months to live. They would have been shocked to learn that I had just been given great news.

The truth was, there was part of me that wanted to be sick again. There was part of me that wanted to undergo treatment and sit in a blue vinyl chair while a nurse injected poison in my veins. If I was in the hospital being treated and under Dr. Forman's care, then I didn't have to live every day wondering whether the cancer was growing inside me. I'd rather be sick than uncertain.

A few years later, I found that naturally I started to worry less about the cancer coming back. I didn't feel the need to talk about cancer as much. Even though cancer would always be part of me, it was starting to feel like a part of my past instead of a part of my future.

And then I had Josie. I will never forget the feeling I had in the hospital as I looked down at her swaddled and sleeping in the hospital crib. I suddenly realized how short life really is. And how even if I lived to be a 100, I would never get to live long enough to show her how much I love her. To protect her from everything that might hurt her. And then the fear of getting cancer, the worry that cancer would end my life prematurely, consumed me all over again.  But eventually, over time, it all settled again and the fear became part of my routine but didn't consume me. Just like I learned how to change diapers and burp a baby, I learned how to be a mom who was also a cancer survivor.