I thought I was prepared for anything when I finished cancer treatment. I had endured the worst days of my life – from multiple surgeries and their slow recoveries, to having the chemotherapy drug that cancer patients call “the red devil” pumped into my veins, losing my hair, being unable to get out of bed, holding my breath 11 times each day to protect my heart from radiation beams – I had got through all of it.
In the months since my diagnosis I had been pushing through in survival mode. I put my head down and followed all the steps that doctors told me would keep me alive. I distracted myself with work, parenting and volunteering and braced myself for the impact of all the feelings that I had been keeping at bay finally overcoming me.
“When all this is over,” I kept telling myself, “then I will feel something.”
During my treatment I remember watching Scott Boland make his now-famous Test cricket debut for Australia and tweeting that the huge outburst of applause and chanting he got from the spectators in Bay 13 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground was what I was expecting from people after finishing treatment. This was, of course, a joke but in truth I did expect to at least feel something that huge when I walked away from treatment. I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was going to be akin to Boland’s rush of adrenaline and joy or if it was going to involve spending weeks curled in a ball and sobbing, but I knew it would be something.
But curiously, those feelings never came.
And so I became convinced that I was stuck – no longer the person I was before cancer ripped my former life away from me, but not someone new either. I felt ghostlike, unsure whether people could see me as I tried to figure out how I fit into the world. What started as a curiosity quickly became an obsession – I needed to figure out why I wasn’t feeling anything and solve it so I could start my new life. Releasing these emotions would surely cast off my ghost persona and reveal my new self hiding beneath it, ready to take on the world.
Many times I found myself unfairly frustrated at people in my life – sometimes for treating me like everything was back to normal when I felt completely changed and at others for treating me like I was different. I couldn’t figure out who I was in the wake of this illness and yet I expected other people to somehow put it all together and interact with me in a way that would help me understand too. I felt cut off and alone, wishing for that big moment to hit me so I could rejoin society and feel at ease with people again.
I had never considered myself as someone particularly prone to believing everything I saw on television, but multiple times since my diagnosis I had found that reality did not match my expectations – only to realise those expectations were heavily shaped by years of popular culture depictions of cancer. On numerous television shows I had seen chemo being administered in a big, warm room where the main character made new friends with people their own age as the group gathered each week to share their stories in cosy armchairs. In reality, I sat in a cubicle alone and even in the waiting room I rarely saw another patient who wasn’t at least 40 years older than me.
I realised eventually that this was another one of these moments – my expectations of a big emotional outburst came from watching movies and television shows. When you see a character experience something big and have no emotional reaction to it, you know what is coming. Before too long they will be bawling their eyes out on the floor of the shower or drinking and partying to excess before breaking down. But, as it turns out, Shonda Rhimes does not write the script of my life and instead I needed to come to terms with myself in much more mundane ways.
I started down rabbit holes of research, determined to discover what was wrong. As I searched, I continually dug up articles about trauma, which at first I dismissed as irrelevant. It felt too big and heavy to belong to me – it was the domain of those who had escaped from war zones or violent attacks. I had been sitting in a comfortable chair in a very nice hospital while kind nurses took care of me. How could that possibly be traumatic?
But the more I read and understood, the more I realised that trauma covers an extremely broad range of experiences and reactions. Research is now being conducted into post-traumatic stress disorder in cancer patients – an important recognition of illness and its associated treatments as potentially traumatic. And so, over time I began to feel more comfortable with the idea that I had experienced trauma and started to understand my reaction within that framework.
I had wanted a moment of triumph, to be awarded a “cancer-free” trophy and hold it aloft in front of a stadium of screaming fans. I had expected a complete emotional breakdown, with a year’s worth of emotions slamming down on top of me as the floodgates opened. It has taken me a while to come to terms with the reality of a much slower and less dramatic process.
While I still don’t have it all figured out, I am no longer waiting for a single moment of clarity to awaken me. I have found a way to be content with recognising and celebrating the smaller moments, like being annoyed when the ends of my hair get wet in the shower and then having that annoyance suddenly turn to joy when I realise it means my hair is growing long again. It’s not Netflix-worthy drama, but it’s a moment that belongs to me and is one of many that are slowly shaping this life after cancer.
• Life Goes On by Megan Maurice is published by Hachette Australia, available 26 June
• In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org
