“It’s officially a Stage 1A cancer.”
Ahhhhh….a deep exhale. Words I’d been longing to hear. I’d tried every stage on in my head – “it’s stage 1,” “stage 2,” “stage 3,” “stage 4.” I didn’t really believe it would be any of the latter. I knew from the biopsy report that it was slow-growing and non-aggressive. But it is lobular, not ductal. Lobular, as Kelly said, means it spreads in a “scattershot” fashion. It’s randomized, pops up here and there. So though it was slow-growing, that didn’t guarantee that its seed hadn’t been planted elsewhere in my body. But for now, I was going with the good news… “clean margins,” “zero of 6 lymph nodes affected.” Stage 1A.
But my excitement and relief were short-lived. Clouded by the events of the week.
Really, does anyone give a crap? Who cares about one person’s cancer in light of the big, bad happenings going on in the world at the moment? I found myself barely able to revel in my own good news. I learned of my prognosis on the same day the media published images of hordes of Afghans running alongside the U.S. military planes at the Kabul airport. I watched the video of the young Afghan girl saying through her tears that the world doesn’t care about them. And the day before, news of the devastation from the earthquake and floods in Haiti – at least 1400 dead and counting. Not to mention the dire effects of climate change all over the world – wildfires, drought, flooding, storms, the magnitude of which we haven’t seen before.
People are dying, fleeing for their lives, being uprooted from their homes, amidst atrocities and natural disasters. It’s like Dante’s Inferno, meets The Towering Inferno, meets The Titanic, meets Wuthering Heights. Will anything ever be “normal” again?
I’m a master at zooming out. I like to think I’m a “big picture” person. I don’t tend to sweat the small stuff. It’s probably what got me through the harder parts of my cancer journey. Like when the plastic surgeon wanted to go into each and every risk of the surgery, I put up a figurative hand and stopped him. Didn’t want to hear it. I float along, assuming that each and every person will do his or her job well enough and that the result will be in the ballpark of what is desirable. Never mind that the plastic surgeon is probably 30 or 32, evidenced by his lack of gray hair and youthful, unlined forehead. Same with the quirky anesthesiologist who asked me to call her Tori. These youngsters wouldn’t be hired by this reputable hospital if they weren’t good at what they do, right?
Ironic that I used to be a regulatory lawyer. It is a job that requires one to be in the weeds, scouring the fine print, from sometimes decades-old documents. I would wade through the paragraphs, reading column after column of eight-point Courier font, some of it blurry from being scanned via microfiche. I got good at it, dissecting and parsing words and phrases, either finding the answer I needed or the ambiguity to support the larger proposition.
But years of doing that became boring. I was hit with that stark realization one day working on a large corporate deal, where the deal was restructured last-minute by the big guns at the top. News of the restructured deal did not trickle down to us minions for at least a week – as we waded through tomes of fine print in the document room. In the end, the hours upon hours of “zooming in” we did were rendered entirely superfluous by the altered deal.
I realized I wanted to be a big picture person. A shaper and shifter. It seemed interesting and exciting and allowed more room for creativity and random connections of the mind.
I’ve often employed my zoom-out technique in the parenting context as well, something I learned from the Parent Encouragement Program. The parent-instructors used to ask us, What kind of adult do you envision your child being? A responsible, helpful, constructive one? Then treat him or her accordingly in childhood. I’ve always told myself, whenever I started to get anxious about this or that project or deadline or club that my kid wasn’t joining, that every child will learn how to read, write, do math, and have hobbies and interests. Look around us – do we see any adults that can’t do these things? No. Even if you don’t go to the “best” school, or play on the “best” team, or what have you. Everyone in life ends up okay for the most part. Big picture: I’d like my children to grow up to be productive members of society who are compassionate, kind, healthy, and self-supporting. That is more likely to happen if I don’t micromanage and sweat the small stuff.
That said, I don’t think it’s possible to be only a big picture person. Sometimes you have to zoom in in order to know that something is or isn’t going to work – a la corporate deal referenced above. At which point you zoom out to a new vista.
That’s what I am doing now. Zooming in: grateful for the good news about my prognosis.
Zooming out: Now what kind of life do I want to live? How can I help make the world a better place?