Queen of Suffering

I've had life-changing news more than once. The first time, I handled it quietly, privately, keeping it together for everyone around me. I became the queen of suffering. But is pushing through really the same as healing? 

In this episode I go back to 2014, when my father's cancer diagnosis brought me home, and a discovery of my own sent my life in a direction I hadn't planned for.

By 2017, I was facing a second diagnosis. This time I did something I hadn't done before. I told people. The difference that made, and why it took me so long to get there, is a big part of what I talk about today.

There's a distinction I've been sitting with for a while now between enduring and actually healing. They look similar from the outside but they're not the same thing. If you've ever mistaken pushing through for getting better, this episode is worth a listen.

LINKS:

• Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ 
• Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/
• Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/
• Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

[00:01:01] Welcome friend. In the last episode, I told you about the diagnosis, the text I got from the x-ray place, the long wait, the failed biopsy, the birthday surgery, and my inability to be still as my nervous system came to terms with the worst news. And at the end of that episode, I mentioned something that I wanna come back to today.

[00:01:25] I said that I was good at suffering, that I knew how to endure that. I'd been here before twice. And today I am gonna tell you about those times because you need to understand where it came from and to understand why the third diagnosis was so different and why something had to change. But before we begin, let's take a long, slow exhale together.

[00:01:54] Now the information I share in this podcast is my own personal experience. [00:02:00] It's not medical advice. Please always speak with your doctor or health professional. So it was 2014, I'd left my husband and I was renting a flat in Kroo, trying to build a new version of my life. I threw myself into my work. It's one of the things that I'm really good at using busyness as a coping mechanism, and I've also come to understand that this is a nervous system response.

[00:02:24] It's a pattern, something that was working well in the short term, but storing up a lot of interest that needed to be paid back later. At the time, I thought I was just being productive and it worked for a while. Then at the beginning of 2015, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It came out of the blue.

[00:02:44] He hadn't been sick, or if he had, he hadn't said so, and he was given about three months to live. This hit me so hard. My dad was my rock. He was my business mentor. I thought he would be around for a lot longer. So when my lease expired, I moved into my parents' house to spend time with him and to help care for him.

[00:03:08] I was back sleeping in my childhood bed and that's when it started. Every time I rolled onto my stomach at night, I'd get a stinging sensation in my breast. It also happened when I put my seatbelt on, just a sting, a brief like bee sting almost. I ignored it for about a month. I had a lot on my mind. My dad was dying.

[00:03:31] I was in the middle of a divorce. I was running a business. The stinging breast was at the very bottom of my list of things that I needed to attend to, but it got worse and it was keeping me up at night. So I eventually went to the doctor. And when I told him about my family history, both my mom and her sister had had breast cancer.

[00:03:52] My dad now had bowel cancer. he said I needed to get a mammogram immediately, not in a few weeks. [00:04:00] Now, the mammogram showed microcalcifications small deposits of calcium in the breast tissue that can indicate cancer, and they wanted to have a look at it with a biopsy. The biopsy was painful, and during it, they weren't able to access one of the lesions, so I had to arrange for a different type of biopsy for that one.

[00:04:20] The first results came back and they were all clear, and I exhaled for the first time in weeks. I just had the last result to wait for, and that came about a week later. And I went into that doctor's appointment, confident I'd had a scare. I'd been thorough, I'd done the right thing and got it checked out.

[00:04:38] The good news was I was fine. The doctor looked at me and said, I'm sorry to tell you, but you've got breast cancer. I can't really remember much about what happened after that. There was the doctor's room, the words, and there was me just trying to get myself home from the city so I could fall apart somewhere in private.

[00:04:56] I completely dissociated. I just had to get home at this stage. I'd moved back in with my husband. It was too much living with my parents. My husband moved downstairs and I lived upstairs. It wasn't easy, but I couldn't be around my parents at this time. When I got home, I shut the door and just fell to my knees.

[00:05:17] My cat, Elsie came over to me and the gravity of what had just been said 20 minutes ago began to hit. I called my friends and none of them answered. I called my husband, he wasn't there. I called my brother. He didn't answer either, so I was alone with this news for about an hour. There wasn't a lot of crying, not then, anyway.

[00:05:39] It was more just shock, numb being dissociated. It's that complete overwhelm. It's almost like you, you leave your body, and I went very internal, very contained. I think in that moment I was already thinking about how to manage this. [00:06:00] My brother was the first person to call me back, and when I heard his voice, I finally let go of what I'd been holding onto since I walked out of that doctor's office, we talked and we made a decision that I've thought about many times since.

[00:06:14] We decided not to tell our parents. My dad was dying of cancer. My mom was caring for him. Watching the person she'd been married to for decades slowly disappear in front of her. And I didn't wanna add to that. I didn't wanna send my dad to an even earlier grave by giving him something else to worry about.

[00:06:34] I didn't want my mom to have to carry the weight of worrying about me on top of everything else she was carrying. We'd wait until we knew more. I saw the surgeon a few days later. He was very calm and reassuring and direct. He said, it's microscopic. It's just day surgery. You won't need any other treatment.

[00:06:54] You are very lucky. So I told my brother, and we made that agreement that if it really was microscopic, if it was just day surgery, if there was no other treatment, then there was no point telling our parents. There's no point adding to the heavy load they were both already carrying, except that one surgery became three, a microscopic became nine and a half centimeters.

[00:07:19] And I just wanna let that sit there for a moment because it was one of the stranger experiences of that whole journey. It just kept changing and unfolding in ways that I couldn't plan for the way each update revised what I thought I knew. New information, coming through new diagnosis, just adjusting myself and then receiving the next piece of news.

[00:07:41] Fortunately the cancer hadn't spread to my lymph nodes, which meant that I didn't need chemotherapy. But because of the size and the nuclear grade, that is like how fast it grows. I needed radiation 25 rounds to reduce the risk of recurrence. And throughout all of this, I hadn't told my [00:08:00] parents, which meant I couldn't tell my clients, my community, anyone in my life who might mention it to mom or dad.

[00:08:07] So I just disappeared for months with no explanation. There was no social media announcement, no community update, no honest conversation. I was just gone and when I came back, I offered nothing. I spaced my surgeries around my dad's birthday and Father's Day because I knew these would be his last. I wanted to be present with him for those days because that mattered more to me than anything else.

[00:08:34] I'd have the surgery, I'd recover enough to show up for him, and then I'd have the next one.

[00:08:39] And that's what I mean when I say I was good at suffering. Not that I was managing it gracefully, but I just had this remarkable capacity to compartmentalize to just keep functioning. To put one thing in a box and tend to another thing at the same time without letting those boxes touch, and I was pretty much doing it alone.

[00:08:59] My brother knew and he was great. My friend Cass knew and she was amazing. I'll always be grateful for her. My team knew and they handled everything well in my absence at the studio, but the rest of the world didn't know, and there was something about doing it in secret that made it lonelier. But also in a strange way, it made it easier because if no one knew there was no questions to answer.

[00:09:23] After the three surgeries to remove nine and a half centimeters, I met with the radiation oncologist to plan my treatment. She suggested I get an MRI because of my family history and the fact that I had dense breasts and I didn't know it at the time, but dense breasts are like a double whammy. It makes you more likely to get cancer and it's much harder to detect the cancer 'cause it won't show up clearly on a mammogram or ultrasound.

[00:09:48] So we did an MRI and they found a lesion in the other breast. And so I had a biopsy and when I came around from the anesthetic still in the recovery area, I checked my [00:10:00] phone. My dad had had a stroke. It was a side effect of his chemotherapy medication. He was in hospital and I was in hospital still attached to monitors and I couldn't leave.

[00:10:10] I'm not gonna spend a lot of time talking about what that was like. 'cause some things are just beyond words. But sitting in a hospital recovery room, groggy from an anesthetic reading, that message is just one of them. So I breathed and reminded myself there was nothing I could do right now, and I'd be there when I could.

[00:10:28] And what I noticed, and I think this is worth mentioning, is that I didn't fall apart. I just absorbed it all. I folded it in. He was in hospital. I was in hospital. I just kept going. That capacity to absorb and keep going. I used to be really proud of it. Looking back, I can see it wasn't strength rather than a really good ability to compartmentalize and suppress.

[00:10:54] My nervous system had become exceptional. That not allowing me to fully feel the scale of what was happening, ' cause it was too much. When the biopsy result came back, I had pre-cancer in the other breast, not cancer yet, but the cellular changes that if left unmonitored would become cancer.

[00:11:14] There were really long medical conversations and second opinions about whether I should have a preventative mastectomy, whether we should remove both breasts before the cancer became worse, and I chose not to. ' cause my dad was dying and I had no capacity for a surgery of that scale 'cause my divorce was still grinding on because I didn't have the physical or emotional support, I would've needed to get through a mastectomy and reconstruction at that point in my life.

[00:11:42] So we agreed to monitor it. Six monthly MRIs and biopsies, watching and waiting. Dad was doing better than expected. He'd outlasted the three months they'd given him. He had more time than any of us thought he would. And after 25 rounds of radiation, [00:12:00] I slowly got my energy back. I returned to work and eventually I moved back into my parents' home to help nurse my dad in his final weeks.

[00:12:08] Those weeks were some of the most significant of my life. We gave dad the gift of dying at home. Mom did the taste shift, and I did the night shift as one of the benefits of having insomnia at the time was that I could just sit in his room and hold his hand all night. in the final days, my brother moved home too, so we could all be there with dad and no one knew that I'd just finished cancer treatment.

[00:12:32] No one knew that I was being monitored for precancer in the other breast. I was just keeping this all quietly in a box while I showed up for my family. Dad passed away in August, 2016, and that was almost 10 years ago now, and I still feel him. The end of 2016, my divorce was finalized. I was ready to put that year.

[00:12:53] That whole chapter behind me. My New Year's resolution that year was to start dating again, and in February, 2017, I met Tim. He was so different from my ex-husband. He was easy to be around. He was steady, and we had a wonderful time getting to know each other that year. And as I was aware, always watching that pre-cancer that was being monitored in my other breast, watching and waiting.

[00:13:18] So it was no surprise that at the end of that year, after the first diagnosis, when that monitoring showed that it'd become cancer, I'd always known it was a possibility. I'd been prepared for it. I was down this road again, but this time I had Tim and having him and someone who showed up, who held my hand in the waiting room who stayed, made an enormous difference to how it felt.

[00:13:41] There was one conversation I was really dreading. I had to tell my mom.

[00:13:46] My mom had just lost her husband, and shortly after that she lost her mother too. She was struggling with, grief and a deep depression, and now I had to tell her that her daughter had breast cancer, not just that I had to tell her that [00:14:00] I had breast cancer, and it wasn't the first time. And that the first time only 18 months earlier, I'd gone through multiple surgeries and 25 rounds of radiation without telling her that I'd made a choice with the best of intentions to protect her from this and that I'd kept it from her.

[00:14:17] I remember rehearsing what I was gonna say, going over and over it in my head, which things to tell her, what order to say things in, how to explain that decision that we made. How to make her understand that it wasn't about not trusting her, it was just trying to protect her. I felt sick in the stomach on the drive over.

[00:14:36] I told her in person I wanted to be there to be able to reach out and hold her hand. I didn't want her to get this news alone,

[00:14:43] and she didn't take it well. Well, not at first. She was really upset. She was angry. She was hurt and underneath that hurt I think was fear because he was her daughter telling her that she'd had cancer and she was back here again. It took mom a few days to come to terms with it. The diagnosis part she could handle.

[00:15:04] She'd been through it herself. She had breast cancer 10 years earlier. It was the Idea that her daughter had been going through something this significant, sleeping in her childhood home, helping care for her dad, and she hadn't even known that I'd done it alone.

[00:15:22] Eventually, she understood and she told me she got it. She got why I made that decision, and she could see the love in it. And she was all on board with supporting me this time. She showed up completely the first time Tim met Mum was in the hospital room after my first surgery,

[00:15:40] and it was so different having people who could really show up for me this time it was so different not having to do this in secret. I was able to tell my community and I received this outpouring of support that I really needed. I recovered faster. I was less afraid. I was still going through something hard, but I wasn't alone [00:16:00] inside it.

[00:16:00] And that experience planted a seed that I didn't fully understand until after the third diagnosis. That being supported really changes the experience. That asking for help is not weakness, that letting people hold you is not the same as falling apart and being witnessed in your suffering is incredibly healing.

[00:16:20] This time they got it all in one surgery, but I needed radiation again, and because both of my previous cancers had been hormone positive, I was strongly advised to take hormone therapy. I refused for reasons I talked about in the previous episode. Reasons around fertility, which I don't take lightly. Now, I wanna step back from that timeline and look at it from a distance because there's something I wanna name here.

[00:16:47] Both diagnoses in 2015 and 2017, I got through by pushing through. By compartmentalizing, by being strong, being capable, managing the logistics, and keeping the emotions in a box. The first time I did it entirely alone. I was young, I was fit, I was healthy. It had come completely out of the blue. I had no model for how to handle this.

[00:17:11] I was carrying this heavy secret. So I just did what I did. I absorbed it, managed it, kept going, didn't let it show.

[00:17:19] And there was something about being good at this that felt like an identity. I'd been through this triple whammy of divorce. My dad dying my own cancer, and I've made it to the other side. I kept functioning. I kept running my business. I kept showing up. here's the thing that I didn't quite understand back then, that I was only beginning to piece together.

[00:17:40] That being good at enduring is not the same as healing. In yoga philosophy, we talk about some scars, the deep grooves that form in our psyche from repeated patterns of thought and behavior. And the more that we run that same groove, the deeper it becomes, the more automatically we fall into [00:18:00] it. Think of it like a riverbed.

[00:18:01] Water flows through and carves the earth, and so the next time it rains, the water just finds that same groove because it's the path of least resistance. You don't choose it, you just fall into it. That's how automatic it becomes. My samskara was absorb the hard things, manage it alone, keep going, don't show the cracks, and I was very, very good at it.

[00:18:25] So good at it that I didn't realize I was doing it most of the time, but just because you can carry a really heavy load doesn't mean that you should. Two diagnoses both survived, both endured, both managed, and after both of them I returned to normal probably within about six or nine months. Business as usual.

[00:18:44] Told myself I'm fine moving on. I had processed all the emotions. This was an experience that shaped me, but it didn't define me. I never identified as a breast cancer survivor. I didn't wanna be the poster girl for breast cancer, but I kind of did identify as someone who's good at suffering. I kind of felt like the queen of suffering.

[00:19:06] And after that third time, something broke and I'm glad it did. ' cause if it didn't, I don't know how I would've gotten through. Now before I go, I wanna say one more thing because it matters here. I was very lucky both times the cancer was caught early. The first time it was a benign cyst, that stinging sensation in my breast.

[00:19:27] When I rolled onto my stomach, that was a warning sign. The cyst was nothing but it sent me to the doctor, and the doctor sent me for a mammogram, and the mammogram showed something that turned out to be cancer. That cyst saved my life. Most women with breast cancer aren't caught at the stage that mine was caught.

[00:19:45] Early detection really is lifesaving, and it's not available equally to everyone. I had the advantage of a clear family history that got me taken seriously. I had access to all the tests that I needed, and I had the income to go private and to pay for [00:20:00] all those expensive biopsies and to take the time off work.

[00:20:04] And after both diagnoses, I thought that's it. I've had my share of this. The statistical risk of recurrence after radiation is about 3%. What were the odds it would happen again? I stayed vigilant. I did the annual MRIs. I monitored, but I also thought I was done.

[00:20:22] Now in the next episode, I'm gonna tell you about the moment I decided to stop being strong about the book I threw in the bin about a decision that terrified me, but also saved me in a way that the surgeries and radiation couldn't. But first, I just wanna remind you that eventually everything changes.

[00:20:41] And beneath all the suffering, beneath the narrative, the fear, the anxiety is the light of awareness, and that light of awareness is always, always on your side. Until next time, my friend.