Patience.
The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, problems, or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious.
A skill.
A skill that I’ve previously been quite bad at.
I hate waiting. Like, really. Hate. Waiting. In my 28 (nearly 29, wtf) years, I have clearly had some level of patience in order to navigate through life. But I don’t remember a time where I truly accepted the wait. I’ve snacked before meals. I’ve used my “do not touch savings” to buy something completely unnecessary the day before payday. I’ve started fiddling with things before my painted nails have dried. I’ve nagged and nagged and nagged (and nagged) Matt to finish the tiling in our new house. I’ve rushed things. Ruined things. Put the second layer of paint on the walls way before the first is dry. All because I just want to reduce the wait. Because I can’t tolerate the feelings that waiting brings. I just want to reach the end result. And whilst that sometimes works in my favour, it often leaves me full of regret (and with a mardy boyfriend).
So, when I was told that I had cancer and that we wouldn’t really know the full picture until surgery, which would be around 6 months into treatment, my lack of patience became a very prominent daily struggle. I did not have the capacity to accept the unknown. And I needed answers. I searched for things on google, I asked people who had experienced cancer before me, I rang my breast care nurse just in case there was something more to tell, I ruminated, wrote lists, read blogs. I needed more information and I couldn’t stand the wait.
Looking back, it reminds me of this time I went to a new gym when I was about 16. I had one of those Christmas guest pass things and went with my mum and sister. I wasn’t remotely into gyms at this point and what follows very much highlights that. So, we’re in the gym (may I add I was dressed in totally unsuitable clothes, I think fleecy loungewear - boiling) and we’re not really sure what we’re doing. Feeling slightly intimidated by the groans and bulkiness of the people in the weights area, we head to the safe zone. Cardio machines. We get on the one we are most familiar with, a treadmill. All lined up in a three. Feeling pretty contained, wedged between my mum and my sister, I start up the treadmill and begin a brisk walk. Nice. Someone looks at me and I make the totally unreasonable assumption that they think I’m going too slow and that I’m lazy and unfit. So, I notch it up a bit, I’m a good sprinter I’ll bloody well show you thank you very much. But it’s not going much faster, so I press the ‘speed up’ dial over and over. Cursing at it to hurry up. And then it starts to get faster and I’m feeling it. Yasss look at me go. But then, wait, why is it getting faster? Ok this is quite fast. SHIT ITS GOING REALLY FAST. My legs are blurred into one. My mum and sister are pissing themselves with laugher. My brain has gone into overdrive. No capacity to problem solve. All its focusing on is keeping me running. And just before I fall off, my mum pulls herself together and presses the emergency stop. Mortified. Not going to lie, I didn’t get on a treadmill for a long time after that.
So back to the present. I knew I needed to do something; I knew my lack of patience was getting in the way. So I took all that I had in me, and I tried to pause for some reflection. But I felt stuck. I wanted a quick solution and my mind was working tirelessly to find me one. But it was the same old tactic - google, breast care nurse, ruminate, lists, blogs. I was back on that treadmill and my brain was in overdrive. Doing all it could to keep me going. And it had clearly made the assumption that having answers was the only way. I spoke to the psychologist that I’ve had some telephone sessions with since starting treatment, and I vented and vented and vented. She listened. She wrapped it all up into a meaningful and contained bubble and we explored my thoughts and my feelings and my behaviours in a way that wasn’t possible for me to do alone.
And she helped me to realise.
All that effort. That anxiety. That desperation to find more answers. It was all pointless. I was searching for something that didn’t exist yet. I was searching for the words: “Ellie Williams 100% has early stage breast cancer, it has absolutely not spread, she will get through treatment and will be totally fine, she will live until she is over 90 years old and will have a rich and meaningful life”. No amount of searching would give me that answer. I simply had to wait. And if I kept giving into my impatience, I knew where I would end up. I would burn out. Fall off the treadmill.
I needed to find a way to hit the emergency stop. To give my mind some time off. To be present in the world. My current reality, not the uncertain future. So, I tried to conceptualise the wait for answers in a different way.
A journey.
My journey was the kind where you’re fully crammed into the car you’ve filled like a game of tetras. The remaining space only allows for subtle movements which you completely rely on to maintain the feeling in your legs. But you tolerate it. Because you are going something you are buzzing for. A family holiday along the English coast. A festival. The place where dreams are made of. The car pounds with music. Oozes with excitement. The chatter of banter and predicting and reminiscing bounces from the front seats to the back. Petty arguments sometimes occur, but everyone knows they’ll be laughed about later. You ride through sunsets. Past beautiful fields. Piglets and lambs. Cool houses. Weird places. You notice it all. But the driver stays silent. Anxiously counting down the minutes to the destination. They focus on the clock. Its taking too long. They go faster and notice the flash of a speed camera. Damn it. Eventually, you all arrive. You roll out the car, stretch your legs and you’ve got that hyper feeling which shows in your eyes and your smile and your whole being. The driver is exhausted and can’t quite make sense of the irritatingly positive vibe. And, the worst part, the driver doesn’t even realise what they missed.
I did not want to be that driver. In between diagnosis and receiving some clarity from my surgery results, I still had 6 months of life to live. So I tried my best to join in with the people around me, the passengers. I tried to be mindful. To notice the beauty in things. And I really did. I had some absolutely amazing times during that wait. I felt like I had been swallowed by love and appreciated the people I have around me more than I ever have. But at times, when triggered by something as small as a TV advert or an Instagram post, the love spat me out and I was left in a lonely and gloomy place. I sometimes lost focus. I forgot to enjoy the journey. I became the rushed driver. Desperate to get to the end result.
In those lonely times, I felt frustrated that I was different, that everyone else had this plan that they could stick to and I didn’t get to know what mine would be. I so desperately wanted to know what destination I was headed to. The ‘you’re cancer free’ paradise or the ‘your cancer has spread’ hell. And that surgery pathology report was the answer.
Until I got it.
They were good results. The best I could have asked for in terms of what the scans had already told us. I was told that there was only evidence that cancer had been in one of my lymph nodes, the one that was initially biopsied, and that, of the tiny lump that remained after chemo, only 20% was cancerous and the rest was scar tissue. They took out the remaining lump, along with a healthy margin and all my lymph nodes under my arm. I was told I would need some more chemo, as a precaution, just to make sure we really had blasted potential rogue cancer cells. Better be safe than sorry. I would then need some radiotherapy for a final zap. It felt manageable. My oncologist talked through the statistics. Chance of reoccurrence. Chance of spread. Chance of a new cancer. Percentages danced around my mind, struggling to settle. And then I heard the words I had been so desperately waiting for. “Ellie, technically, right now, we think you are cancer free”.
You are cancer free.
I didn’t get that fireworks feeling. I didn’t want to jump for joy. I barely even wanted to celebrate, and I settled with the acknowledgment that I had not received bad news. The results led to new questions and the longing for more answers. I was confused. Frustrated. Torn between telling myself it was almost all over and warning myself that the anxiety about cancer coming back might never end. A life of freedom or a life imprisoned by worry. Paradise or hell. Paradise or hell.
I jumped between the two for a few days. Alternating my destination and focusing only on what it would be like there. Fantasising over the joy of a cancer free life. Ruminating on the terror of one ruled by fear and cancer. Compensating for the anxiety caused by believing in one by focusing on the other. I struggled to focus on the reality of the life around me and eventually I lost my temper. I had to do something to stop giving into being that god damn driver. This sounds fluffy, but I think I almost had to step out of my mind and look at things from an observer perspective. To let go of the thoughts and the feelings and the experiences that were directing me to perceive my situation in such an inflexible way. Doing that helped me to appreciate where I was going wrong.
Black and white thinking. Believing my destination was going to be either paradise or hell and trying relentlessly to reduce the wait of discovering which it would be. Forgetting that fleeting between the good times and the not so good times is simply a regular feature in the ebb and flow of human life. Second to second, minute to minute, year to year, we experience ups and downs along the way (ngl 2020 has felt a bit unbalanced but I digress). We don’t know what’s coming next, and we keep on going, heading further and further into the unknown. There are good times that turn to bad, bad times that turn to good. Times that we can’t, for the life of us, categorise as one or the other. But we continuously learn. We continuously grow. And we continuously adapt our behaviours, beliefs and goals in line with it all.
So when I catch myself longing for the answer, ruminating about when or where this cancer journey ends, I try to remind myself that I don’t know and I will never know. I will never get a definite answer. A “you will always be ok”. But no one gets that luxury. In order to live, we sacrifice certainty. We expose ourselves to the inevitability of adverse feelings and experiences. We don’t get a great deal of choice. As the saying goes, shit indeed happens. But what we do have some control over, is how we choose to respond.
I completely bought into the narrative that I’ve built for myself over the years. I labelled myself as impatient and told myself that I couldn’t do anything about that. I used that story to justify my initial response, to reduce the wait for answers by devouring google, and reasoned that I couldn’t help it. And it cost me. I missed out on things. I felt horrible. I almost fell off the treadmill. But I’ve learned that I don’t have to act on the thoughts that tell me I can’t tolerate a life of waiting for answers. I don’t have to be the person a previous version of me already decided I was. Who I am is flexible. My life is flexible. And my attitudes towards it can be too. So I choose to let go of the need to know my destination. Instead, I choose to resume my focus on finding ways to appreciate the ride.
Oh, and guess what, I painted my nails and waited for them to dry today. Who’s impatient now? Life lessons from cancer. That’s the beauty in the c-weed.
