Reflection 34: The elephants in the room

 Annually, around Halloween the big money producers in Hollywood trot out the newest horror flicks, knowing full well that people will stampede to watch them. (Evidently, people like to pay for being afraid.) Horror and its ally, fear are a sure bet with movie goers. But that is all about entertainment. What I'm dealing with is not.

 I have been thinking a lot about fear in my war with cancer. I personify my fears for identification purposes by calling them elephants. Paulo Freire writes in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," people like to label things. It helps. They never seem to disappear completely. Sometimes they are loud and sometimes quite. But they are hanging around, even for a cancer survivor. I could argue that they are louder for this survivor because of the fear of 'second cancer.' It is so real, so scary. 

 I try to remind myself that fear is a perfectly natural human reaction. Everyone has it. People are born with fear built into their psychic makeup. It is a defence mechanism; a survival tactic. The body senses danger and responds with the emotion called fear. Fear helps protect us. It can be our friend, although we don't think of it that way. Seldom does it spark a panic attach, at least in me. Even in the operating room with 10 masked health care professional surrounding me, I felt only a little apprehension, nothing more.

 Over time I have learned to cope with my fears. Removing the problem that caused the fear is the first and easiest choice. That is a no brainer as teenagers like to often say. Don't stand in the way of the charging elephant is perhaps easy. 

 Then again, maybe not.

 At the very least acknowledge the fact that there is an elephant in the room and you fear it. Everyone, of course, has their own way of coping with the hand life deals them. Many I talk to will not even say "cancer" or even the "c" word. I get the impression that they would rather ignore it, or at the very least deal with it in an offhandedly fashion. If that works, okay, but not for me. I prefer to examine it, quantify it, qualify it, read about it, try to understand what I am dealing with, talk about it to anyone who will listen, write about it and go public with it. That is my therapy.

 The biggest elephant for me is not the one in the room, but the one or two that might happen to join the one in the room. It is the fear of the unknown. The 'What if?' unknown fear factors are not the most troubling. Why have I developed virago lately? Why do I have ringing and 'crickets' in my hearing...again? I think of worst case scenarios constantly. Is my body clear of cancer? Will I loose the hearing in my left ear? How will I adjust as a deaf person? I am currently reading about Beethoven, just in case. He went deaf half-way through his stunning music career. 'Be prepared' my Boy Scout leader always preached. I believe him.

 "It is highly unlikely that cancer can appear on both sides of the face and neck. That is statistically not probable," the oncology nurse recently informed me.

 But the sun shines on both sides of my head was my silent reply.

 The elephants in the room always seem bigger and more threatening at night. They go from the more passive Indian to the aggressive African type. Perhaps this is because there are less distractions for my mind to concentrate on at night. At that time of the day my mind is a whirling collage of ideas, most incomplete. I become quite awake; many a time at 3:05 a.m. strangely enough. Most are irrational. Not hardly ever are even a few dismissed. If I pay attention to them I could easily conclude that I am going to get 'second cancer.' I try very hard not to pay attention to that conclusion. 

 I can hardly wait until January when I am scheduled for a C-SCAN on both sides of my head and neck. Then we will have scientific evidence on where we are at. My sincere hope is that the zookeeper will have released a few white mice into the room to scare the elephants into oblivion.