While I admit that I hadn’t watched any of her acting projects, I could completely relate to her reaction to preparing for radiation therapy.
The article focuses on an Instagram post that she made after leaving a doctor’s appointment during which she received her radiation tattoos, expressing surprise at the fact that they were, in fact, actual tattoos.
This really resonated with me because I had a similar reaction to getting my own radiation tattoos. I had never had an interest in getting any kind of tattoo myself. But now, with cancer, nothing was under my control anymore. It felt like my body was not my own.
Nope, never wanted a tattoo. But had to get four anyway (minus the pretty flowers). (Photo by Lucas Lenzi on Unsplash)
And I remember being told that now I was going to get tattooed, just like that. No fanfare or anything. I don’t remember being told in advance, although I would not be surprised if I had and it simply hadn’t registered. I felt helpless a lot of the time and I had hoped that after chemo I could get a sense of self-ownership back. But the tattoos were a big “NOPE” to that!
I agree with Nicole, it’s the permanence of these things and even the long-term nature of some of the side effects of cancer treatment that add to the emotional impact of the disease.
I don’t know much about Nicole’s tattoos, but because I am pale with lots of moles already, my tattoos were blue to distinguish them from everything else on my skin. So while they were just small dots, to me they were very visible when I looked in the mirror.
My post about the experience (“I Didn’t Expect THAT: Radiation Tattoos“) talks a bit more about this. Now, almost 8 years later, I’ve made peace with the blue dots in the same way that I’ve tried to accept my scars and aches and whatever else has hung around since treatment.
Made peace, yes. But like the tattoos, although their sharpness fades, the memory remains.
So, something occurred to me as I was dealing with stress about a work project…and then got news of changes that may require us to quickly move from the place in which we’ve lived for over ten years.
I am experiencing two different textures of anxieties. I’ve heard people discuss chronic and acute anxiety, but I would characterize the way I experience anxiety differently.
The first anxiety may wear you down but won’t require a complete change in your life. Photo by Aiony Haust on Unsplash
The first is anxiety about what may happen or anxiety about what has taken place in the past and I can’t change. That encompasses stressful events that you need to work through, like a job-related project, which requires holding on and managing. It’s more of a chronic type of stress even though it might be time-limited. There are things out of my control or, in the case or what has already taken place, there’s no going back. It doesn’t qualify as life-changing as it may intensify and relax depending on conditions.
The second, however, is anxiety about something that *is* life changing. Those of us who have been handed a cancer diagnosis know what it feels like. It means that the future will look dramatically different from what we expected it be. Other examples are a death of a loved one or losing everything in a natural disaster. A sudden involuntary change in your living situation. This requires letting go and radically recalculating what you’ve become very used to. It can be very difficult to do, especially for those of us who like stability in our lives.
The first anxiety is exhausting. The second is terrifying. Having experienced both, I can definitively state that the first anxiety pales in comparison to the second. In fact, in the face of the second anxiety we may actually let go of the first completely and wonder why it ever bothered us.
The second anxiety is more intense and will alter life as you currently know it. Photo by Ann on Unsplash
At the same time, as terrible as it may be, the second anxiety offers us a perspective and clarity that we would be hard pressed to accept as quickly any other way.
I do not wish either of these anxieties on anyone, but if there’s a bright side to them it’s that the same type of mindfulness practice that helps us deal with the anxiety of the first kind will also help when the expectation-smashing heaviness of the second anxiety hits.
Although you may still wake in the middle of the night, heart racing and wishing things had not changed, a consistent mindfulness meditation practice will provide you with the tools to smooth the jagged edges of rumination and fear, slowing the breathing and with it the heart rate, even in the presence of frightening thoughts.
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Of course, since this is a mindfulness blog in addition to being cancer-related, I cannot resist talking about one of the most effective techniques that I’ve found for calming myself: belly breathing.
Start by simply breathing deeply into the belly, as anxiety often results in shallow breaths. The deeper the inhale, the more air you will have for the exhale – try matching inhales and exhales in length. It won’t happen immediately. Give it time.
Create a breathing cycle and keep going. Establish a breathing practice and stick with it. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Keep breathing into the belly, fully engaging the diaphragm, allowing it to drop and make space for your lungs.
As you do this, focus on the breath. The uncalm thoughts can still be there, but gently allow them to sit on the sidelines for now. I used to try to completely push them away, but they would bob back up to the surface like a balloon pulled under water, bringing the intensity of my anxiety back with it.
So let them be there…keep one eye on them if necessary but give your breath the main stage.
Once the inhales and exhales have evened out in length, insert a short pause between them. Breathe in … pause … breathe out … pause. Just a little stop to elongate the cycle. Consistently breathing into your belly.
Transition to full box breathing, where the inhales, exhales and pauses are all equal in length. If you get very comfortable doing this, for a little extra, try to make the exhales just a touch longer than the inhales.
Or if it gets tiring, simply try to make your exhales a little bit longer than your inhales and dispense with the pauses altogether.
Maintain this type of soothing, intentional breathing for a few minutes or longer, depending on how your body is responding or what your nervous system needs today.
Truly, you don’t have to do this perfectly or adhere to a specific count. Simply focusing on your breath and slowing your breathing will help immeasureably in making space for your thoughts so that you can back away a bit and survey the scene without feeling claustrophobic, no matter which anxiety you’re dealing with at the moment.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve really enjoyed the Coursera course, “Engineering Health: Introduction to Yoga and Physiology“, which I highly recommend. One of the recurring themes of the class that I’ve found particularly relevant is that of effecting incremental and meaningful epigenetic change through yoga and meditation.
The class lectures went through the physiological mechanisms by which this happens, and this information would be reason enough to incorporate mindfulness and breath-to-movement in one’s life. But for someone who’s experienced cancer, there’s something even more important: a sense of control.
For me, the most terrifying part of my cancer diagnosis was the lack of control over what was happening to me. First, my body had turned on me by cultivating a tumor, the ultimate goal of which was to take over my organs and kill me. Then, my doctors were giving me drugs that by design would kill certain parts of me, with the intention of taking out the tumor before it spread to really important parts of me (brain? liver? heart?).
My body was a battleground in the war between my rogue cells and modern medicine. I had to sit there and take collateral damage if I wanted a chance at survival.
Disclaimer: So I feel the need to stress here that we do not yet know how to reliably prevent the formation of cancerous tumors, but there are things that we can do to greatly lessen the risk. I’m willing to bet that managing stress would have a powerful impact on prevention.
While I did begin meditation at that time, had I started learning to deal with my anxiety and accompanying physiological responses years ago, I might have been able to sidestep the disease. There is science to this which I will cover in a later post, but my doctors *hate* it when I postulate possible causes of my tumor since if we could truly pinpoint the cause, we’d be able to cure the disease. However, given what we do know about stress and inflammation, I can guarantee that my stress response did not help in keeping me cancer-free!
In the Coursera class, Dr. Ali Seidenstein (NYU) explains, among other things, how the small positive changes that arise from learning to control the stress response by applying yoga and meditation affect your genetics. And this is key. While you’re born with a certain set of genes, the science of epigenetics describes how you can affect gene activity (think, turning a gene on or off) and thereby have a different outcome from someone else with the same gene.
Finally! Something that *I* can do that provides a rare sense of control in an uncontrollable situation! For a cancer survivor, this offers a nugget of hope to hold on to in the face of continuing medications that may or may not help your survival. Medicine is tested on a variety of individuals but there’s no guarantee that their success will translate into your own (news flash: cancer = no guarantees, period). But knowing that you can engage in behaviors that, when applied over time, will actually benefit you on a genetic level…that, my friends, is priceless.
Oddly enough, one of the things that scared me about cancer was that it threatened all the work I’d put into my body. Being a bit under six feet tall since my teenage years, I was called “big” a lot whether or not I was overweight. At 16, I went through a phase of disordered eating. That passed, but I retained a sensitivity to how I was perceived by others. Always, I was fearful of being judged, and that pushed me towards perfectionism.
Fast-forward to 2017 and my diagnosis. When I started researching breast cancer, one thing that struck me was that the information I found didn’t mesh with my conception of what cancer was, in terms of what the treatment did to the patient. I had always thought of cancer treatment as having a wasting effect on the sufferer. But then I read of the propensity that many breast cancer patients had for putting on excess weight, not only throughout chemo, but also due to taking estradiol-blocking medications like Tamoxifen.
Wait, what? Gaining weight? But I’d always thought that cancer patients lost weight! Sure enough, google “breast cancer weight gain” and you get a lot of entries from reputable sources that warn about this tendency to pack on weight. My Nurse Navigator echoed that point, noting that many women “put on 10-15 pounds.”
Many decisions in my life have been motivated by a fear of being judged.
This provoked a lot of frustration. I had established excellent diet and fitness habits for the very purpose of building strength and endurance and avoiding the weight gain that accompanies advancing age. I had kept emotion out of my food choices (kudos to my mother for being careful about not connecting food and emotion). During my time as a stay-at-home-mom, I’d obtained a highly-respected personal trainer certification because I wanted to be sure I knew what I was talking about. My standards were high, but even if I couldn’t attain my version of “perfection”, I put in 100% effort and that made me feel good.
And then, cancer. Despite doing everything I could think of to maintain peak health, I still had not been able to prevent the development of my tumor. That was extremely unsettling. But for me, having my whole body shape change as a result of this was almost worse.
Predictions of the future raced through my mind: I was going to lose my lean mass, lose my fitness and put on ten or more pounds. I would be judged for “letting myself go”. None of this would be under my control. Just like the cancer, it was all happening to me, and as far as I was concerned it was bound to ruin my life, whether or not it actually killed me.
However, as with so many other things related to my cancer, this didn’t go the way statistics predicted. And that’s why there’s a Part 3 to this body image series…
Frantic Shanti 