My teeming brain

In later autumn I had a health setback that landed me in hospital for a little over a week. Fortunately, it wasn’t a return of cancer but rather an infection at the site of my original surgery. Infections aren’t good news, clearly, but pharmaceuticals make them quite treatable. The abscess was caught by a standard MRI scan that my oncology team ordered after my radiation and chemotherapy treatments. I was admitted to the hospital within a few days and scheduled for a surgery to clean out the infected area. After the surgery, I was put on a broad spectrum of antibiotics while the infectious diseases team figured out exactly what bacterium they needed to target. This took almost a week, to my surprise; however, during this time I regained my strength and got the pain under control. After a week I was discharged and recovering at home with the help of a nearby clinical service that managed the antibiotics, the IV pump I wore 24/7 and the line in my arm for the IV. 

I’ve had a chance to reflect on that experience, which included some firsts for me. For one thing, it was my longest stay in a hospital; my first surgery to remove the brain tumour only required 3 nights total—less than I had expected given the nature of the operation. This more recent stay was more than twice as long as they worked on getting a handle on the infection. 

Spending that amount of time in the hospital had an impact on me. It’s an environment that doesn’t allow you much space to be distracted from why you’re there. It centres your illness even when you want to be thinking about something, anything else; you don’t forget for a moment you’re the patient. I understand why the institutional experience is what it is. The whole goal is to regain your health, and everyone and everything is focused on getting you well enough to be discharged. Still, it’s a disorienting experience when you’re in the midst of it and almost surreal when you’re reflecting on it afterward.

The first few days of recovery were a bit of a blur—a lot of rest and pain management. I got accustomed to being monitored on a regular basis—having my vital signs recorded every few hours and my responses to neuro and strength tests captured. I became used to talking about my pain, symptoms, medication and more personal things. In short. I really didn’t forget about my condition for a minute. 

As I got stronger, the days were longer and harder to fill in the narrow confines of my room and the ward. A lot of reading, napping, and walking in the corridors. Once you’re back on the outside, being in the hospital seems like a twilight world—smaller, dimmer, more confined, rigidly scheduled, with little privacy and blurry boundaries between night and day. Thank goodness for the visits from friends and family, which helped me keep my sanity. 

I was so relieved to return to the quiet comfort of our home. At the same time, I had to adjust from being looked after by attentive nurses to managing my treatment with the local clinic. It required a change in attitude. Becoming more independent and feeling more in control of my situation were wins, but they weren’t without stress. Being connected 24/7 to equipment that needed daily maintenance brought its own set of issues. Happily, the IV treatment and all its paraphernalia ended and life returned to something closer to normal for the holidays. 

I started by calling this experience a setback, and truthfully it’s taken an effort to see it in other terms. A second neurosurgery followed by an awkward six-week recovery period has stolen precious time we had earmarked for more interesting life adventures. But these are the cards we were dealt. One of the challenges in these situations is that there’s so much that we don’t control. The progress of the disease, the decisions of the health team, the issues with medical equipment and drugs, the unpredictable response of my body to treatment—we only exert a limited influence over these things.                                                                                         

What we can control is our attitude to everything that’s happening. As setbacks come up—and they inevitably do—we can choose to approach them in ways that help us see beyond the roadblocks to the detours that allow us to move forward. 

It’s been helpful for me to reframe my recent health experience so that it’s not a monumental event that I’ve been recovering from. Instead, it’s been a series of little obstacles, all of them solvable—or at least manageable—with help from the right people. We face these challenges on a daily basis, and some days present more and bigger ones than others. We learn to tackle them and move forward. This is just life unfolding. 

These days, my challenges look different than they used to. Everyday work-related issues and larger career goals have been supplanted by trips to the ER or a clinic. There have been a host of insurance forms to complete. These changes were neither predictable nor preventable; however, by trying to focus on what’s most important at the moment, they have all been attainable. 

Managing my mental health has been as critical through all of this. Working at maintaining a positive emotional state has helped me deal with all the other practical concerns with more calm. 

I’ve had to work on patience and tranquility, especially when something that feels like a setback arises. It’s surprisingly easy to give way to frustration or even panic when something goes wrong with your health, as I’ve learned. Keeping your cool and taking the time to problem solve are essential to get control of the situation. Easier said than done, you might say, and you wouldn’t be wrong. (Thank God for the support of a strong and stoic partner when you need one!) Slowing down, getting control of your emotions, catching your breath again—they’re critical in these situations and require that you enlist other qualities.

Such as mindfulness. One of the things that I’ve learned through focusing my attention on the present moment is that it’s always manageable—and sometimes beautiful. At the same time, even our small problems can seem insurmountable when we project them into the future and speculate about their potential impact on ourselves and others. The keyword here is speculation. It’s so easy to mistake possibilities for certainties. But when we stay focused on what’s actually happening now instead of what could happen somewhere down the line, we can eliminate a lot of unnecessary anxiety. It allows us to access that space of inner peace and tranquillity that is key to healing and wellbeing. 

We can’t only live in the present moment, of course, as appealing as that idea sometimes sounds. Our lives are busy and complicated, and we all need to spend time planning and preparing for what comes next.  When you’re dealing with a health issue like cancer, you add a layer of concerns and responsibilities that force you to spend time looking ahead, setting priorities, organizing your schedule, and sometimes worrying about what’s coming next. The worrying part is normal but also the least helpful. For me, the key is to recognize that these troubling thoughts are just that—thoughts—rather than objective realities. And by practicing mindfulness, by obtaining a measure of distance from those thoughts, it becomes easier to access an internal calmness and tranquility that I need to heal. 

Mindfulness and the peace it helps me attain are also making it easier to stay optimistic. I’ve had to be very intentional about this, because I wouldn’t say relentless positivity has always been an inherent strength or even something I consistently worked on. It’s not that I consider myself a worrier or that I’m generally fatalistic in my expectations about outcomes, but I might have entertained thoughts of myself as someone who possessed a measure of “healthy pessimism” about life and set that as a kind of virtue. Anticipating how things could go wrong becomes a sort of responsibility in this line of thinking. 

Cancer has made me reconsider all this. When I’m dealing with a setback and my mind wanders to negative, speculative places, I’m working at recognizing what I’m doing, shutting down the negative scenarios I’m imagining, and replacing them with positive visualizations and affirmations—all while re-grounding myself in the now where everything is fine and even wonderful. As I said, I have to be very intentional about my attitude and work on it every day. Some days are easier than others, but there really isn’t any other option but to live in hope and positivity.