HUMPTY DUMPTY

Surgery day is getting closer, and I'm beginning to worry about everything. (If you knew me, you'd know I have been worried about everything for forever, so how could I possibly worry any more? Well, I do because I can. Or is it I can because I do?)

My older sister has flown into town to help with whatever is needed while I'm having surgery and recovering. YAY! She is also here on business (she has a client nearby), but will provide the greatest benefit by assisting my mother (who no longer drives and is dependent on me). In theory this is a splendid idea — move the load of responsibility off my shoulders and onto my sister's. 

However, sister doesn't know how much there is to be done. She tells me in an email that she will call me during the car ride to her work appointment to discuss any details. There is no  way we can go over everything on the phone and without her writing it down. 

So I write up some lengthy notes and take them over to my mom's. The three of us — me, mom, sis — sit at the kitchen table as I try to explain everything that I'm worried about: my mother's medical appointments, her upcoming taxes (which haven't yet been started), her bills (which I facilitate paying), her bank statements, her prescriptions (which I pick up) ... the list goes on. Both my mother and sister tell me the exact same thing: do not worry about anything. Huh? Aren't they listening? I'm the only one who knows how the bills are currently being paid. I'm the one who knows what's currently happening with my mother's health. (My mom, bless her heart, tries not to think about any of these details and therefore does not remember much about any of them). 

But somehow, I'm now supposed to simply stop worrying and focus on my surgery. Everything will be taken care of. Just like magic.

Well, I'm not buying any of it. 

Because here's what will happen: I will be out of commission for a few weeks while my mind is on my own healing. My sister and mother won't know (or recall) what is supposed to be taken care of if I don't tell them. Things will fall through the cracks. And when I finally re-surface, I won't remember anything either. Then my sister will fly home and I will be left with the fallout and the pieces.

What, me worry? That's crazy talk.

Maybe if I allow them to help me solve a small problem I see on the near horizon, they will "get it." So I tell them how friends and neighbors want to bring me meals, and that I would love that, but if I can't make a sandwich for myself, how will I be able to get out of bed and go downstairs and answer the door while also getting our two adorable but ferocious barking machines (otherwise known as dogs) to go outside so I can let "person with the food" inside without their being pounced on (or worse, if the barking machines don't like them, nipped at). OH, they say. That IS a problem!

These are but a few of the details I am stuck on in the days preceding my surgery. I am consumed with worry about everything because I somehow feel everything is my responsibility to worry about.

Then it hits me. Things are going to have to change or I will never get through this ordeal. I'm going to have to learn how to let go. I'm going to have to give up worrying. Cancer's going to have to "cure" my desire for control.

Right. Just like Humpty Dumpty learns to effortlessly dance along the edge of a brick wall.

DITCHING CONTROL

Handling any major life event requires some degree of compartmentalization. (Otherwise, how would we get anything else done?) Dealing with cancer is no different. 

I am by nature a "big picture" thinker. I tend to look not only at the details that comprise my life, but how the sum of those details become my world. And before BC, I would have bet money that this mode of thinking would have been my greatest asset in dealing with this illness. But post BC, I find the opposite to be true. 

If I spend too much time looking at the big picture these days, it creates way too much anxiety. I get all hyped up and worried and filled with fear, and my ability to think rationally marches right out the front door. It's better for me to stay deep within the forest — not looking for the trees so much as focusing on the veins in the leaves. I call this small-picture skillset my blinder mentality. I imagine myself as a race horse, saddled and ready to run, but with special rose-colored glasses that enable me to see just the matters at hand. The stuff I can control today, in this hour, in this minute. 

Because it is all about CONTROL. If cancer teaches anything — and its lessons are unending — it is the new truth that you are most certainly not in control. Here's how the phenomenon presents itself.

You are riding along on the magic carpet ride of life when suddenly the beautiful, fanciful rug that you weaved for yourself and your family, the rug you have loved dearly all your days, is pulled abruptly out from under you. You — family and all — fall quickly, and with a loud thud, to the ground. 

You help your family up first, because that is what you do. Then you figure out how to pick yourself up. You stumble and drag your sorry ass to the nearest chair. You look around but nothing is familiar anymore. Everything has changed: different colors, different smells, different people (who are all those men in white coats?). It's a completely different land. And you never asked for any of it.

You never wanted to move to the edge of the cliff. You don't care to know the generic names of half a dozen prescription meds. You have no desire to spend your day in a waiting room (or, worse, waiting for a pathology report). You just want your old life back, dammit. You want what you had before cancer: control. 

But that is the very thing breast cancer strips away from us. And even though we know it, BC makes sure we never forget that we most definitely do not have control. Never did. Never will. Duh. 

Unfortunately there's no way back to the world we were so comfortable in before (or at least the world we thought we were comfortable in). Cancer leaves us in chaos that will drive us absolutely, positively and 100% completely mad if we focus on it. And so we don't. We can't. That's what The Blinders are for. We pull 'um out, put 'um on ... and off to the races we go.

So rather than worry how many more weeks it will be until I can get in to see the master surgeon who will ultimately remove this cancer growing inside my breast and tell me whether it has (or has not) spread beyond the milk duct in which it has likely been growing for years and refer me to a plastic surgeon who will do his very best to put Humpty Dumpty back together again before he sends me off to see the Wizard of Oncology, I WILL drink a tall, cool glass of water, eat my pesticide-free tomatoes and lay down to take a nap. 

Because these days, in my new small-picture world, that is how I roll.

(See Intuition for more of the story.)