Why Me? Hope, Fear and the Survivor’s Guilt
Today, Jan 2nd 2025, is exactly 12 years since I was told: ‘I’m 99% confident it’s cancer but the biopsies and further tests will confirm’. It was the perfect opening of hell to 2013, though it dawned on me that I was comfortably numb, as I greeted my 2 year old daughter with smiles and hugs when I got home. It wasn’t me who had cancer, it was Naz.
Our memories serve many purposes. One of them is to reflect on the past to build a future. In these 12 years, my memories of the roller coasters adjusting to the ever changing symptoms I have experienced have served to understand the moment, not the future. The future is the moment, and strangely enough I have implicitly planned for the future navigating my way through the dark times with hope. I have learned that hope is survival and survival is hope. If this logic is true, perhaps I am living the future.
To live with hope is not a crime or a gift when you have been diagnosed with cancer, but a human right. The other side of the coin though is fear. While we live with hope we also live with fear that the cancer will return and we may die. This is not unusual as fear is essential to survival. If we didn’t fear danger every time we crossed the road we would not survive.
Approximately 30% of women with a breast cancer diagnosis experience return of cancer where the original cancer comes back, i.e., it metastasises to other parts of the body and is incurable with a median life line of 3- 5 years. Many of the women I got to know in these 12 years of my 'survival' so far are no longer here. They lived in hope as well as fear, just like me, they didn’t lose a battle or a fight, they did their best just like many others who are still here.
When you can’t quite explain why some of us die and others ‘survive’ this disease, it could be a combination of many factors which scientific research is trying to figure out, but you end up worrying and fearing your chances. You also experience what we know as ‘survivor’s guilt’. Strangely enough you are puzzled about your own survival and can feel guilty for surviving when others, just like you, have not. I can count endlessly the women who one by one left us too soon, sometimes suddenly without much notice. My stomach churns and I feel a cold sweat on my forehead when I look at some pictures and question why am I the only one here in person. How did this happen? Why? It was not their fault.
12 years is a long time, but as time ticks along I am fearing the return of my cancer in waves. Sometimes the waves hit the shore loudly raising alarms other times the waves don’t quite reach the shore and disappear quietly. But, I know that the space between hope and fear can be small. I know that I cannot determine how the waves change in movement. I feel guilty for not being consumed by the waves, I miss my friends and so dearly want to see them. So many thoughts cross my mind and it gets confusing.
I think of all the work I've done on anxiety and depression all these years, all the work we do in BRiC, all the research we do to better lives to improve resilience, all the women we've united, all our plans, there is so much left to do. And we will until we can.
I decide to stand and readjust so that the waves only touch what I can afford to lose, for now, and walking towards my aims, I let my tears melt my hopes and fears into one.
I am dedicating this to all of BRiC's amazing members.
Nazanin Derakhshan, Founder and Head of BRiC.
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