Fear Factor: Understanding Cancer’s Grip on Your Loved Ones
“Face your fears.” “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We throw these phrases around to encourage others to do what is difficult. Like most quotes and adages, they are as limited as they are universally used.
“Facing your fears” might help you climb a ladder to overcome your fear of heights, but it is a paper shield against a force of real fear, cancer. While slogans, hashtags, and cause bracelets feel good, they vanish when you’re left alone with the quietest, confident, and most effective killer we know, the Big C.
The Grim Reaper, the Bogeyman, and Freddy Krueger have nothing on cancer.
I’m not trying to be a fearmonger. Rather, I want more people to understand what a cancer patient, survivor, or caregiver might be feeling behind that strained smile and “fine” reply when you ask how they’re doing. Regardless of which of those categories your friend or family member is in, I guarantee cancer’s chilling fingers have grabbed hold of them.
It’s like hearing heeled shoes on a cobblestone road; the click-clack lets them know cancer is always close behind.
My wife Alicia was recently diagnosed with Hairy Cell Leukemia (HCL), a blood cancer. While HCL is not curable, it is treatable. The success rate for treating HCL through chemotherapy is exceptional. Neither my wife nor I believe that she will die from HCL. Nonetheless, cancer’s cold grip tightened on both of us.
The process to get to remission is brutal on the body, and in most cases, it’s a temporary relief. For the rest of their lives, HCL patients will look over their shoulders to see just how close that monster is following them. It’s like hearing heeled shoes on a cobblestone road; the click-clack lets them know cancer is always close behind.
That haunt is real for cancer survivors. Since becoming a cancer caregiver, I’ve had the opportunity to hear the stories of many affected by cancer. One friend in remission shared with me that he has panic attacks and sleepless nights because he knows cancer will come back (his is incurable). Another shared with me that she lives in fear until she hits the magic x number of years cancer-free mark her doctors gave her, which is supposed to provide her peace of mind. I think she doubts that. A caregiver told me he self-medicates most nights with mild sedatives to get sleep due to cancer anxiety.
I remember clearly when cancer’s fear grabbed me. It wasn’t the first time I was overcome with emotion regarding Alicia’s cancer. This was different. It came in the middle of the night, following a fun evening we shared with friends. It was a last hurrah of sorts before she began chemo.
In my thoughts, I saw Alicia. Floating around the party like she does, with her contagious smile as she randomly pulls people into her orbit and coaxes the best times out of wallflowers. She is full of life. Her always fashionable shoes seem to never make contact with the earth for too long. I love watching her from across the room.
I went to bed that night, smiling at those thoughts.
Then it happened. I woke up with a start. I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt like it was flattened by an anvil weighted with fear and sadness. I got up and walked to my desk, and I wrote everything I felt and saw. It was the darkest, saddest, most hopeless thing I’ve ever written.
In my thoughts and dreams, cancer taunted me. He showed me that he would snatch my love away. He held her smile, her laugh, her enthusiasm for life, hostage. He showed me her body battered by chemo poison; he showed me her lying in bed for a month, or longer, without the energy to get up, let alone paint smiles on the faces of strangers. Cancer showed me that he owned her body and soul, if only for a few months.
It gutted me. Cancer made me feel that I would lose my wife, lover, and best friend in a few days’ time.
I’ll try to describe the cancer fear in words. It’s cold. It’s still. It sucks your words right out of you. It’s not fast. It’s more like a smooth subway pickpocket. You’re riding along just fine, and then suddenly, without notice or noise, your security vanishes. It’s just gone.
The tears? They flow like water squeezed out of a sponge. No sobs or stuttering words because the fear took those too. Quietly.
I’ve been afraid plenty in my life. I’ve had a gun pointed in my face, I’ve nearly severed my thumb off, and I’ve been thrown like a rag doll by 12-foot swells while SCUBA diving. This was entirely different.
After the sponge wrung tears silently down my face, I shared my writing with Alicia. She looked me in the eyes as she never had before. She was scared, but she was more confident than me. In fact, she seemed oddly thankful. I realized that I had caught up with her. Cancer had already violated her in the same way, weeks ago. But now I understood the feel of the silent chill.
In that shared experience, Alicia knew she would never be alone in this fight. At that moment, I realized that I could admit my fear, even with just a look, and get back to my job — taking care of her.
Cancer is not one of those “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror(s)” that FDR railed against in his famous speech. It’s real, and it lets you know it.
I know the fear I felt that day will never go away. Alicia and I will hear those heeled shoes click-clacking on our life’s cobblestone road. Sometimes softer, sometimes louder, sometimes slower, and sometimes faster.
That sound will never leave us. Cancer will subtly remind us that he lurks in the background with each questionable lab report, spot on our skin, or weird fever. He’s waiting to take one of us again.
Much like HCL, the cancer fear is not curable, but it is manageable. We manage the fear by respecting its power and knowing we never have to face that fear alone. We never have to feel misunderstood. Because there’s a club of us out there, a “Cancer Club,” who know the chill and the silence, and we’ve lived on anyway. This “Club” is the best defense and offense we have against that click-clacking incorrigible bastard. Even Freddy Kreuger thinks cancer’s an asshole.
