It's important to make the effort to push past the anxiety that comes with a cancer diagnosis.
BY Kim Johnson
PUBLISHED March 02, 2018
Kim is a nursing student who is hoping to find her place amongst the phenomenal oncology nurses and doctors who cared for her sister. She loves reading, volunteering and enjoying the outdoors of Colorado.
There are many emotions that come from having cancer in your life. For me, the worst was the anxiety. While everybody experiences this emotion on some level, the kind that comes from cancer is a vastly different variety. It is a constant feeling that is not only an emotion but also a physical manifestation when things were at their worst.
The anxiety I felt caused stomach aches, fevers, nausea and headaches. It was a leave-you-breathless kind of anxiety that others may not be able to understand. It is hard to find a way to cope with this kind of anxiety, because in the end, it feels like the only thing that will fix it is for cancer to go away.
At its core, anxiety begins in the mind, and I am somebody who struggled with anxiety before cancer. So, with cancer and all the unknowns that it brought to my life, my anxiety got exponentially worse. I began to think so much that I rarely slept. My brain was on a constant cycle of thinking and I was unable to shut down to provide a sense of peace for sleep. This cost me dearly, and a state of exhaustion and sleep deprivation became a constant in the three years that my sister had cancer.
The anxiety I felt caused stomach aches, fevers, nausea and headaches. It was a leave-you-breathless kind of anxiety that others may not be able to understand. It is hard to find a way to cope with this kind of anxiety, because in the end, it feels like the only thing that will fix it is for cancer to go away.
At its core, anxiety begins in the mind, and I am somebody who struggled with anxiety before cancer. So, with cancer and all the unknowns that it brought to my life, my anxiety got exponentially worse. I began to think so much that I rarely slept. My brain was on a constant cycle of thinking and I was unable to shut down to provide a sense of peace for sleep. This cost me dearly, and a state of exhaustion and sleep deprivation became a constant in the three years that my sister had cancer.
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