How do you cope with the fear of recurrence?
PUBLISHED April 06, 2018
Brenda Denzler is a writer and editor living in North Carolina. She received her doctorate from Duke University and worked as an editor at UNC-Chapel Hill before she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer in 2009. Since then, she has devoted a great deal of her time and energy to understanding and writing about cancer, cancer treatment and the impact of pre-existing PTSD on the ability of doctors to give and patients to receive medical treatment.
Learning to live with a cancer diagnosis is kind of like learning to drive a car. At first, you are hyper-aware of every little thing and maybe scared, because driving is actually a pretty risky thing to do. Not only do you have to be very careful not to make any mistakes, yourself, but you also have to be very careful about all those other yahoos out there on the road! But you buckle up, start the engine, and slooooowwwwwllly back out of the driveway and onto the road. And every driving rule and skill you've ever learned is looping through your brain.
Flash forward a bit – say, two years. You run out the front door, jump behind the wheel, start the car, buckle up and zoom down the driveway and onto the road, where you head willy-nilly for wherever. It's not that driving a car has gotten any LESS dangerous in those two years, it's just that you've become accustomed to dealing with the risk you assume every time you get into a car. You take a few precautions. You buckle up, still. However, most of the road rules and skills you need are now automatic for you, and you hardly bother to stop and think about them.
Flash forward a bit – say, two years. You run out the front door, jump behind the wheel, start the car, buckle up and zoom down the driveway and onto the road, where you head willy-nilly for wherever. It's not that driving a car has gotten any LESS dangerous in those two years, it's just that you've become accustomed to dealing with the risk you assume every time you get into a car. You take a few precautions. You buckle up, still. However, most of the road rules and skills you need are now automatic for you, and you hardly bother to stop and think about them.
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