By Erin Cummings
My friend and fellow survivor Stephanie Gayhart, MHI, RN, recently wrote about how a seemingly innocuous event could stir up profound feelings of anxiety about her cancer experience. I wanted to tell her that this gets better with time. Maybe, for some, it does. But for me and many others, being jolted into the past continues to be an ongoing challenge.
One would think that after almost 53 years, the bad memories are softened by time. And, for the most part, that’s true. It’s one of the perks of aging, I guess. There’s no denying, however, that there are still triggers – things that bring me right back to the time that I was being treated for Hodgkin’s and the terror that went with it.
There are small things, like having a wave of nausea, that can make me sweat with fear – fear that nausea will become uncontrollable vomiting – a hallmark of my MOPP chemotherapy. Or having some (minor) post-menopausal hair loss and thinking that I will wake up with patches of hair lying on my pillow.
Most recently, even the title of the movie “September 5” was enough to throw me into a tailspin. It is an Oscar-nominated film about the events of the Munich Olympics in 1972. I remember those events very well. I watched them play out in real time on TV while lying in bed in a hospital.
I was 15 years old, just diagnosed with Hodgkin’s, and lonely as hell. The pediatric ward that I was in was mostly empty. The few kids that had been there during the five weeks that I was a patient had gone home and were back at school – where I wanted to be. I longed for something “light” to distract me from my own predicament – something like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Happy Days,” or “Laugh-in.” Even kid’s cartoons or soap operas would have been welcome entertainment.
There was nothing else to watch on TV except for the minute-to-minute horror of those Olympic games. Men with black face masks and rifles, athletes being marched from their dormitories, and Jim McKay announcing, “They’re gone. They’re all gone.” It was terrifying. It was also a reminder of how utterly unpredictable life could be.
I have yet to watch “September 5,” but I probably will. Maybe it will end up as some kind of immersion therapy for me. Maybe I’ll be able to experience it as an Oscar-worthy movie and one that accurately describes one of the most painful moments in history.
Long-term cancer survivors often carry a heavy load. It’s not just the constant struggle to stay healthy and reduce the risks of late effects – it’s the cumulative effect of those health challenges and the emotional burdens that accompany them. Anxiety, depression, and PTSD are fairly common in these survivors, yet they are often not addressed. I hope that, in the future, we can do a better job of recognizing the full spectrum of what it means to be a long-term survivor. Those of us who are still managing to “hang in there” could use some help.