Point #2: FEAR Known and Unknown
Today I am grateful for carbonation and coffee, but not in the same beverage. :-)
Point #2 from "17 Points of Clarity" is "For me, fear of the known is less than fear of the unknown."
In my own cancer experience, this stemmed from making it through surgeries and procedures, waiting for pathology results, facing my first chemotherapy treatment. There was significant fear in my first surgery and being put under. Would I wake up?
Significant fear in the waiting for reports that would tell us just how scary, or not, my cancer was. Had it spread to my lymph nodes?
There was a vast unknown in wondering how I would feel when poisons were pumped into my body to help kill cancer cells. Would I experience nausea?
I used plenty of faith on a daily basis to make it through those fearful times. I still do. The waiting was always the hardest. Once things got underway, once there were some answers, I could move forward and face the fear.
A lurking fear that began when my first sister, Zita, was diagnosed with BC, was heightened with my sister Mary Jo's diagnosis two years later. And further heightened with my diagnosis two years after that. Fear that it would come back in one of us, metastasize and kill.
That fear lurked until it surfaced in 2018, with Mary Jo's confirmed metastatic breast cancer diagnosis. This phrase above has shifted for me since then. It was better to live in the fear of MBC getting one of us. The fear of the unknown. Better than the reality that it now has gotten one of us. Fear of the known was significant in the year from Mary Jo's diagnosis to the last months of her life.
Fear continues to morph and evolve in various ways when it comes to cancer. I used to use the mantra "replace fear with faith." Then, I realized all fear can't be replaced, nor should it.
My new mantra became and remains "Face fear with faith." Face the known and the unknown, face each day, with faith.
Point #2 from "17 Points of Clarity" is "For me, fear of the known is less than fear of the unknown."
In my own cancer experience, this stemmed from making it through surgeries and procedures, waiting for pathology results, facing my first chemotherapy treatment. There was significant fear in my first surgery and being put under. Would I wake up?
Significant fear in the waiting for reports that would tell us just how scary, or not, my cancer was. Had it spread to my lymph nodes?
There was a vast unknown in wondering how I would feel when poisons were pumped into my body to help kill cancer cells. Would I experience nausea?
I used plenty of faith on a daily basis to make it through those fearful times. I still do. The waiting was always the hardest. Once things got underway, once there were some answers, I could move forward and face the fear.
A lurking fear that began when my first sister, Zita, was diagnosed with BC, was heightened with my sister Mary Jo's diagnosis two years later. And further heightened with my diagnosis two years after that. Fear that it would come back in one of us, metastasize and kill.
That fear lurked until it surfaced in 2018, with Mary Jo's confirmed metastatic breast cancer diagnosis. This phrase above has shifted for me since then. It was better to live in the fear of MBC getting one of us. The fear of the unknown. Better than the reality that it now has gotten one of us. Fear of the known was significant in the year from Mary Jo's diagnosis to the last months of her life.
Fear continues to morph and evolve in various ways when it comes to cancer. I used to use the mantra "replace fear with faith." Then, I realized all fear can't be replaced, nor should it.
My new mantra became and remains "Face fear with faith." Face the known and the unknown, face each day, with faith.
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