It was the second time my boyfriend (now husband) remembered crying during our relationship. At least that he admitted to me. The first was when he found out a coworker of his in the Air Force had committed suicide. Such a young, promising life, gone. One minute they were chumming it up in the office, the next thing you know they‘re mourning the loss of yet another young life this time by his own hand not in the throes of war or a more traditional demise befitting someone in the armed forces.
The second time was that afternoon I called him. He was riding his bike home from work, his new mode of transportation (and exercise), and I was sitting on the couch, slumped over, my body melting into the plush fabric enveloping my shrunken form. “My mom has cancer.” In retrospect dropping such an earth-shattering bomb at a time in which his own two feet weren’t even planted on solid ground probably wasn’t the best choice but one doesn’t really think in those moments. One just does. He was my first call. And on that day, he cried for the second time since our courtship began some two years prior.
Well, my mom had cancer. I can still picture that godawful couch I was sitting on, smack dab in the middle of it, not too far too one side nor the other. Seems a description synonymous with my life actually, not too extroverted nor too introverted, not too over the top nor subdued, not too calculated nor too flippant. I’m the walking talking human version of goldilocks and the three bears.
My mom called me that afternoon like she would any other, there was nothing unusual in that. It was the context of this particular call that has its memory burned deep in the hidden recesses of my mind. It was a Friday, it must have been. I rarely sat on the couch like that unless it was a Friday and I was thoroughly demoralized by the work week. It took all my energy just to sit upright on a Friday afternoon and pick up the remote.
Months before this fateful Friday afternoon my mom tore her MCL on the dance floor at a company party. While I wish I was making that up, this tragic dance floor accident catapulted her onto the fast track of getting her health and wellness in check after decades of neglect. She was thrust into the incredibly unflattering spotlight of doctor’s offices visits and the like as she worked on remedying her busted knee.
I remember when she told me about her accident, practically laughing at the serendipity of it all (my mom loves to dance), and her first visit to the doctor’s office. I felt guilty for being so far away. At the time I was living and working in Los Angeles, about a six hour drive or one hour flight from my mom in Sacramento. You see, ever since I was four it’s been just me and my mom. We’ve forged a special bond since the time I was born which grew only stronger when my parents split up and our dependency on each other deepened. Here I was, living my life in Southern California while my mom was lying in a bed somewhere being poked and prodded, not able to walk and in insurmountable pain. While it was an unfortunate and albeit freak accident, it was only the beginning of what would be another year of unexpected bad news and being poked and prodded in strange hospital beds.
It was a wake up call, tearing her MCL. In a moment of vulnerability and displeasure with herself, my mom admitted to a primary care doctor that it was the first time she’d visited one in 25 years. At the time, I was 25. You do the math. It wasn’t until her results came back from the gynocologist after a necessary annual check-up making up for decades of lost time that the alarms truly went off. There was an abnormality, something that required further investigation and testing. Never something you want to hear. From any doctor truthfully.
Shortly after that the news came. The confirmation of a sinking suspicion, something was wrong, had been wrong. For who knows how long really. I don’t think either of us were expecting the ‘C’ word to be the result of years of avoided doctor’s visits, ignoring abnormal symptoms, tiny hints in her every day life that something greater was amiss, but that was the consensus. Uterine Cancer. Stage 3. Immediate surgery, chemotherapy, radiation…And so it would begin...
I don’t know that I cried when my mom told me on that Friday afternoon. I was her first call, just as my then boyfriend was mine. She confirmed that I was sitting down and had a minute to talk and while she tried to remain the fortress that she had been my entire life, the walls crumbled to the ground. Her voice was shaking and she told me the news through broken sobs. It’s funny, when we see moments like this in movies it’s like the entire world splits in two. Our lives suddenly become memories only separated across time, across two distinct junctures in our lives or in my case ‘before I found out my mom had Cancer’ and ‘after I found out my mom had Cancer.’ But on the big screen, the actor is overcome with grief, unable to stand on their own two feet, collapsing into the arms of a friend, or family member, their bodies ravaged by deep, uncontrollable sobs. The kind that leave you gasping for air, wondering if your own life might in fact end in this moment of insurmountable anguish. My movie moment turned reality wasn’t like that. Not at all in fact. I was in shock. They say you’re truly in pain or seriously hurt if you don’t cry at all in fact. Well, perhaps that explains the dryness of my eyes on that fateful Friday afternoon. ‘After I found out my mom had Cancer…’
My entire life, all 30 years of it now, my mom has been my rock. She’s been my shoulder to cry on about everything from boys to bad marks on homework or a test to friendship troubles. In that moment, the roles were reversed, my mom needed her own rock. She cried and cried, she cried for the adverse effects of her not visiting a doctor in over two decades, she cried for the journey that lay ahead, she cried for the guilt she felt in what her choices up to this point might now mean for her loved ones, she cried for her younger self, that girl who had such unadulterated joy who tragically disappeared over the course of a handful of years in which her life was taken over by a toxic work environment, she cried for the unknown that frequently comes with a diagnosis as serious as this. Cancer…
Little did either of us know that that diagnosis, the starting point of that unknown journey, was one of the most transformational days in either of our lives.
At the time I was battling my own demons. Ironically, like my mom, I was miserable in my career which affected my personal life, how I physically looked, acted, treated my loved ones, everything. I hated my job and dreaded waking up and going to work each day. No surprise, it affected how I showed up in the work place because it was becoming increasingly harder to put on a good face every day and do a job that felt absolutely demoralizing and hindering my personal and professional growth. I hated the person looking back at me in the mirror. Physically she wasn’t the beautiful, sunny girl I once knew but had transformed into an unrecognizable version of Casey who carried a permanent chip on her shoulder. The world was out to get me. It kicked me down every chance it got, every time I felt like I was finally making strides and perhaps getting my feet back under me, it swiped them out once again and left me in a defenseless, crumpled up pile on the ground. It’s true that when you focus on all the things going wrong in your life, you invite more things to go wrong and contribute to the aura of negative energy enveloping your spirit.
I was in a dark place. I felt trapped by my circumstances and couldn’t see any semblance of a way out. This was my reality, a dark, ominous rain cloud following me throughout my days.
And then, suddenly, it all changed. After processing the reality that my mom was dealing with a cancer diagnosis I realized my insurmountable ‘problems’ suddenly seemed rather small. The fact that I couldn’t seem to get out of my dead end job that was beating me down mentally, the fact that I hated who I’d become physically and how I’d allowed my anger toward the world to manifest in the way I woke up every day, none of it really mattered anymore. None of it. What mattered was being there for my mom, the woman who gave me life on this earth and spent the majority of her life fighting for and protecting my own. That’s what mattered. It seemed almost comical to care about anything else.
I learned so much from that time in my mom’s life (and my own) and what we would experience together over the course of the next year or so of doctor’s visits, chemotherapy treatments, radiation and more. Perhaps the biggest lesson in my young adult life. I learned the transformational power of mindset. While my mom was absolutely crushed by her diagnosis, she gave herself time to grieve and then put on her fighting gloves and went to battle. She showed up for herself each and every day over the course of her cancer journey, focusing on the few things she could control and ensuring that she was doing her part by eating right, getting enough sleep, listening to her body, nourishing it from the inside out. The easy thing to do would have been to give up. That would have been easy. To spend her days overcome with immense sorrow feeling like her cancer diagnosis was a death sentence. That it defined her. But in reality she did just the opposite. She saw her diagnosis not as a death sentence for her life but as a welcome closure of that chapter of her life. Goodbye to the unhealthy, stressed out version of herself and hello to the woman who put herself and her health at the forefront of her priorities.
My mom isn’t the person she was five/six years ago when she got her diagnosis. She has transformed, physically, emotionally, spiritually. She’s a better version of herself in every way. But at the same time I’m not the same person I was when she got her diagnosis. While I still have plenty of things I’m personally working on, I wake up (most) mornings and feel joy. Sunshine on my face, crystal clear light in my eyes, joy. Sure, I still have my fair share of ‘Sunday Scaries’ but I’m no longer burdened by insurmountable negativity. I feel genuinely optimistic and overwhelmed with the excitement of living this beautiful gift we call life. Each and every day of my life is a gift but more importantly, each and every day of my mom’s life is a gift.
Over the last handful of years, I’ve seen my life transform before my eyes with the realization that my mindset has the capability to be the steering wheel of the metaphorical car I travel in each and every day. I have my mom’s cancer to thank for that.
My mom recently got her ‘5 year all clear’ at a doctor’s appointment. 5 years of being cancer free. My mother-in-law had a reoccurrence of breast cancer a few years ago now and my husband and I were recently recalling the days in each of our respective lives in which we found out our moms had cancer. Or each other’s mom had cancer for that matter. While we were together years before my mom had cancer and obviously years since he said ‘you know, it’s crazy, I don’t remember my mom before cancer. I don’t remember your mom before cancer.’ And as I sat there, shaking my head in support I realized, I don’t know that I remember myself before then either…