Surviving Life: A Story of Mental Health and Cancer Intertwined

Content warning: self harm

There is never a good time to be diagnosed with cancer and there was something about my timeline that really threw salt on an open wound. Before cancer was not easy, which meant that after cancer came into my life everything was just that much harder. My senior and retry of senior year of college was spent managing years of pent up anxiety, trauma, and depression. My outlet became physical pain through harming myself and keeping it a secret until it was too much to handle. I start my story before cancer in an effort to normalize and destigmatize-not romanticize-these feelings and the outlets that we seek to relieve ourselves of these intense emotions as we go through life, especially when faced with a life altering diagnosis as a young adult. Before cancer, I had already spent a lot of time in hospitals, though a very different experience and atmosphere from the sterile smells and constant beeping of IVs instead, it was void of personal technology, stripped of your privacy, and lots of therapy.

My life wasn’t great in August of 2019, but I felt a positive trajectory coming. I had just moved into a new apartment and was starting my first classroom based position. That all came crashing down after a single day of orientation at said job. I didn’t even have a chance to sign up for health insurance. My hope, with specks of depression popping up every so often, turned to numbness. I felt I became an emotionless patient trying to take in the practicality of every procedure drug, and side effects each doctor described. I don’t know if this was my instinctive fight or flight response or the reactive response to my parents’ emotional states during those first few weeks.

The entire 10 months, I distinctly remember only crying once, after my follow up with the neurosurgeon once we had already known the pathology, but still didn’t know the primary tumor, that it had metastisized, or any sort of treatment plan. In reflecting on that year of hell, while I wanted to think I was entirely numb, I truly wasn’t. Deep down, I was sad and angry-the anxiety was very forthcoming but that is something that never stops for me. I felt hideous with my bald head. I questioned why this happened to me. Everyone’s lives were moving on and I felt stuck in some sort of Twilight Zone of endless clinics and hospital rooms.

In May 2020, at the height of a global pandemic and social isolation, especially for someone who was neutropenic, without any plan or warning my oncologist stopped my treatments and said I had responded well to the chemo and would get scanned in 6 to 8 weeks. This is where everything fell apart.

You go from constant hospitals, doctors, clinic visits, calls from nurses, to nothing with no plan, after being told at the beginning that I would be on treatment for the rest of my life. All those emotions I had worked so hard to block out came rushing like a tsunami. The onslaught of all the intense fear, anxiety, sadness, and anger was so overwhelming, I felt I had no way to cope that I resorted to old patterns and behaviors. I suddenly went from fighting for my life every day to trying to take my life because coming to terms with reality was too much. For the next year, I fought for my life in the hospital, but instead of care packages and visitors, it was safety checks and lots of therapy. I am proud to be 5 years NED and 2 years self harm free and while I don’t like being sad, I allow myself to feel it when it comes. Life after cancer has felt like a constant uphill battle, and I am worlds away from who I was six years ago before cancer threw a wrench in my life, but honestly, maybe I would not have gotten the professional help and support that I needed to give life another chance.

Headshot photographer photo credit: Heather Secker