when cancer comes to call
When cancer comes to call,
Nobody prepares you for the day that you sit in front of an austere looking consultant thinking you’ve just got some narrowing on your throat, and they ask you, do you know why you're here today?
Nobody prepares you for the ‘C word’, The one that is 6 letters, ending in R, CANCER.
The world stops, time stops, vision stops, everything starts to move in slow motion as the words fall onto your body & psyche, tearing everything apart in that one sentence.
‘You have cancer’.
Once spoken, the word cancer reverberates through the body, reaching both in and spiralling out before you. A whole myriad of pictures blur into one… stories heard, or memories filter through your brain in a cacophony of colours, sounds and feelings at exponential speed.
A headstone appears in what we have been lead to believe is the end results of cancer…and in many it is…
It reads.
‘In life, she danced’
Nothing prepares you for... a cancer diagnosis, ‘especially when you are doing all the things’…don’t drink, don’t smoke, exercise, healthy mind set, mind the toxic environments…blah blah
Yet, here I am. It’s claimed me for THE DANCE OF MY LIFE
There is a call in me that is asking for me to stop, pay attention, assess, and change direction. A direction to where? To what? Is there a direction?
This word that is loaded with so much. So much loss for so many. This loaded word. creates a fear in us of death. Whilst all of us at one point will face death, we don’t expect it to come in our prime…before ‘we think we are ready’…the arrogance – it is like God’s ultimate test of faith, asking us to relinquish the control we ‘think’ we have in this humble, mortal thing called LIFE!
Death can come at a time that we are not ‘prepared’ for it, and I question, are we ever prepared? This ‘diagnosis’…this 6 letter word… has made me so deeply aware of my mortality.
One night in the middle of the night, I was... literally playing with the questions
‘Do I let go now? At 55? I feel like my life is only just beginning. Well, I can tidy things up and leave nice parcels, presents, and cards for people that I care about and love’. I saw the heart centred notes of appreciation and love all tied up with a pretty ribbon in piles and instructions. Do I leave a world behind I find heavy & my soul is tired, so deeply tired & lonely from keeping myself so unavailable from love
Do I do I take that route?
OR
Do I take the route that scares me more…the one to LIVE…which to get to a place of truly living involves… fear, pain illness, drugs that petrify me, surgery that will totally change my body and life?
You know what I realised?
I was as afraid of life as I was of death, as humans, many of us, myself, included, have such a warped idea of death. The greatest ending and unknown.
Most of us don't understand death, we fear death or do we just ‘avoid’ it?
Some comes from the religious model of you will go to hell, but truthfully, we do not talk about death. When you speak to some people, is it a goodbye or are you simply returning to source? I know not. I have not taken such an existential road in my life that has been open to those questions, because I've been so afraid of living.
Stephen Jenkinson says, ‘in order to die well, and you have to live well’.
How many of us truly live? How many of us allow ourselves to step outside the box, to take off the mannequin face that we are, and allow ourselves to truly be the totality of who we are. We are so locked into ancestral shame, personal shame, cultural shame. Cultural fear, personal fear, the what ifs, the why should/shouldn’t I?
Rather than allowing ourselves to navigate through life with heart. With love.
In just 4 short weeks, this journey so far has shown me so much. So much of where I have held resentment. in my life. I also see that as an ancestral pattern. A huge blind spot for me, and when I saw it, I realised how much I've been holding back on living my life because I was resentful. I was comparing, I was judging. When all I want to do is love. and be loved. And there is the irony, this oesophageal cancer diagnosis means I cannot nourish myself in the way that I have always nourished myself through food. I have to ask people to hold me as I sob uncontrollably. In the depths of vulnerability. I must allow myself to be seen and held and it is so painful, for I've always been the strong one. Supporting others. And yet, I'm about to embark on a journey where I have to be supported.
My heart is breaking open again and again and again, as I have to allow myself to be held by people travelling hours and hundreds of miles to come and help take me to an appointment, because I have nobody here that is available. Being sick and single and childless you see what loneliness looks like…some people step away unable to support, at the same time others gently knock at the door of your heart, people you’ve not seen for years, those who you’ve had the smallest interaction with not anticipating the impact that small moment has for another… fuck… it takes cancer to show me how deeply loved & appreciated I am – I am being humbled again and again – why do we have to be taken to our knees and the darkest depths to allow ourselves to fully be loved …and to mirror that to ourselves?
I see that the heart is the biggest journey of this diagnosis for me,.. It is a journey to love unlike any I have ever known. I thought I'd come to a place of self-acceptance and self-love. And yet, again and again and again and again. It is. breaking into a thousand pieces. And for that, I'm grateful. I do not want to leave this mortal earth. Not ever having loved and accepted myself fully. Or haven't been loved and allowing myself to be loved, because right now, I see how many people love me. And how many people care about me, and I have never truly let that in before, or allowed myself to see it or be with it.
This is not a journey I would ever have thought I would be doing. I'm fit, healthy, apparently not. I have a disease that is usually... Linked to men who smoke in their 70s. So unless I am channelling my grandfather, this is completely and utterly a bolt out of the blue. I am still in shock, the denial is subsiding as the appointments continue in the diagnostics so we know just how much of my stomach & oesophagus I will have to surrender to the surgeons knife, while in the background the nutrition, acupuncture, HBOT, mistletoe & other remedies are in place to assist.
I received an intuitive message a few weeks ago, ‘this is not a death sentence. This is, of course correction ’.. with this I hold faith and say, Thank you, more grace, please as I face the deepest most terrifying journey of my life including chemo, major surgery & a 12 month recovery…
Thank you for being here…I wish you love, I wish you health and I wish you LIFE!
As a self employed person who has no idea how she’s going to do what she loves fully for a while If you feel you are able to help have set up a ‘Gofundme’ to assist me with my bills & therapy!
With love and deep gratitude…please don’t wait – go do LIFE & LOVE…
Sarah-Jayne