Cultivate Calm

What did I do wrong?

• Monica Rottmann • Season 2 • Episode 12

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After three cancer diagnoses across a decade, the question that keeps surfacing isn't about treatment or recovery. It's why. This episode is an honest look at that search, what it turned up, and what it didn't. Including Gabor Maté's work on emotional repression and physical illness, the BRCA testing process, and what it actually means to carry significant family cancer history without a clear genetic answer.

The episode also gets into the limits of explanation. By the second and third diagnoses, the emotional repression framework didn't hold as neatly. The lifestyle factors were covered. The genetic testing that I did have came back inconclusive. At some point, the search for a reason becomes its own kind of suffering, and this episode is honest about that too.

There's something here about the Sword of Damocles, the fear of recurrence that doesn't fully go away, and what happens when you stop organising your life around cancer-free milestones that have already failed you. Two percent is a number that appears throughout this episode in more than one context. What replaces the milestone counting is something simpler and harder to hold onto: presence. A Tuesday afternoon in the park. The sword still there, but no longer the thing you're staring at.

A decade in, the answer to why me is probably never coming. This episode is about what you do with that. Not a resolution, but a reframe: less about why it happened and more about how you play what you've been dealt. 

That shift is what Energy Alchemy is built on, and this episode is where it comes from. 



LINKS:

Why me? That's the question I've never quite been able to leave alone. The third diagnosis over 10 years. At some point, you stop calling it bad luck and start wondering if there's a pattern, a reason. Was there something I did or didn't do? I've researched it. I've sat in the dark with it at 3:00 a.m. I've had well-meaning people offer me their explanations. Today I'm going into the question: Why did I get cancer? But before we dive in, let's take a long, slow exhale together Now remember, the information I'm sharing here is my own personal experience, and none of it is medical advice. Please always speak with your doctor or health professional for personalised guidance Gabor Maté wrote a book called "When the Body Says No." And in that book, he says that there's a connection between chronic emotional repression and physical illness. Not that personality causes cancer, but that there is a long-term physiological cost of suppressing emotions, particularly anger, and it takes a toll on the nervous system and immune function. I read it after my first diagnosis, and I understood. The first time I had breast cancer was in the middle of my divorce, and I had a lot to be angry about, and it wasn't always safe to express that anger The situation required a kind of managed calm that meant swallowing a lot of what I actually felt, and it was also against the backdrop of my dad dying, so I held a lot of it in. And I'm someone who avoids conflict by nature anyway, and that combination of holding that big secret, holding in the anger, and having nowhere for it to go is exactly what Gabor Maté was talking about. So yeah, for the first diagnosis I can relate. But the second and the third, I'd done years of work by then. I was no longer sitting on unexpressed emotions. I'd learned to feel things in real time and, uh, clear away my emotional backlog, and there was plenty of it, believe me. So that explanation doesn't hold for all three diagnosis, which means it's a factor, but it's not really the answer And here's what makes the question harder. I'm not the obvious candidate. For most of my adult life, I was vegetarian. I didn't smoke, and since my first diagnosis, I don't drink very much. I'm careful about the chemicals in the home and in the products I use. I read labels. I've been health conscious for as long as I can remember. So when people suggest it was diet or lifestyle or not eating enough plants, or that I need to take better care of myself, I have to laugh. I have been taking care of myself. I was fittest and healthiest I've ever been when I got cancer the first time, and I don't say this to be self-congratulatory, but on the outside, I looked healthy. If lifestyle was the answer, if diet was the answer, we would have found it by now, which means the answer's somewhere else Now, when I was first diagnosed, I was referred to a geneticist because I did have a family history of breast cancer, and they tested for the BRCA gene, the breast cancer gene, the one most commonly associated with breast cancer, and mine came back negative. But the geneticist looked at my family tree, and since seven out of 11 of direct relatives had cancer, he said there's a strong chance that there's some other genetic defect. Both my grandfathers, both my parents, aunts on both sides, that's not just bad luck. There's something possibly there. And he said that there's further genetic tests that you could take, and I considered it for a moment. It would be good to know if I did have a genetic defect. Maybe that's something that caused this cancer But I spoke with the geneticist and his job was to also counsel me on making the right choice for me, And that oftentimes there is no genetic link, it's just bad luck But he wanted to be honest with me about what further testing would mean in practical terms, and I'm really glad he was. In Australia, it's currently legal to discriminate against someone with a confirmed genetic defect and limit their life insurance and income protection. You can be profiled against your own result. And it's not just that. Me having my genetic testing made available then also implicates my brother, my niece, my nephew, because they're linked to me. So it wasn't just making the decision for myself, it was the potential implications that my family would be genetically profiled and discriminated against, and that was even before I had Ruby. They deserve to walk into adulthood without a genetic verdict attached to their family name before they had any say in the matter. So I declined further genetic testing, which means that I'm just acting as if I do have a defect, which means the constant monitoring and surveillance, the colonoscopies, the ultrasounds, and sadly, when I'm ready for it, a hysterectomy as a precaution. Some days it feels like I made the right call. Other days it just feels really shitty with no good options Now there's something that used to feel like a dark joke and now feels part of my life. When I was first diagnosed and had radiation, my oncologist told me the chance of recurrence was 2%, a really small number, and that kind of number's supposed to reassure you, and it did for a while, and then I got cancer again in the other breast, and I got told the same thing. There's a 2% chance of recurrence And when I was given the all clear to start trying to fall pregnant after my second round of radiation, the doctor explained the situation plainly. The treatment had affected my eggs. It was unlikely I was gonna get pregnant, certainly not using my own eggs. I'd have to use IVF. The chances of me conceiving naturally was about two percent And we managed to get pregnant naturally. Ruby's my 2% baby. So it's three different moments, three different 2%'s, recurrence, second diagnosis, and then Ruby, a one in 50 chance three times all falling in my direction At the same time, I stopped seeing the 2% as a threat and started seeing it differently. Evidence that I exist at the edge of probability The other thing that never fully goes away is the fear of recurrence. There's an ancient Greek story about the Sword of Damocles, and Damocles was a courtier who envied the king and his power and wealth. So the king offered to swap places for a day. Damocles sat on the throne, and he enjoyed the banquet and felt the luxury of it all, and then he looked up and noticed a sword hanging directly above his head, suspended by a single strand of hair. Everything was fine. The feast was still there, but he couldn't enjoy a single moment of it knowing what was hanging above him That's what it feels like living with cancer. Life's good, the banquet's laid out, the people are there, but you can't ever forget what's above you. I'll have scans for the rest of my life. Every few months, I'll be sitting in one of those waiting rooms wondering. Most of the time it's fine. Most of the time I'll walk out and go home and cook dinner. But there's other days when the scan's approaching or a result is pending, or I feel something that might be nothing, and that sword catches the light. Any strange niggle, any strange lump, any strange or odd feeling, and it's there. That background hum of vigilance never fully goes quiet, and you just have to live with that. You can't eliminate it. You can't think your way to certainty. You can't learn to carry something that you can't put down when it's still live. And people talk about being cancer-free for X years, but I made it to all those milestones. I made it to two years, and then I got cancer again. I made it to seven years, and then I got cancer again. At the moment of recording this, I'm technically 18 months cancer-free, but I'm not gonna measure it in those milestones anymore because they don't mean anything to me So the question keeps coming back, why did I keep getting it? Was it my genes? Was it repressed anger? Was it lifestyle? Was there some spiritual lesson I was apparently meant to learn three separate times? And here's the thing, our human mind loves to find meaning in things. It's how we're wired. We're always on the lookout for patterns, causes, reasons. We want things to have a point, because a pointless thing is even harder to bear And I've done that, believe me. I've constructed all the explanations. I've done all of that, and it still feels random Because a decade in, I have to be honest, I don't know why this kept happening to me, and I will never know. And the search for an answer, for trying to control something I can't control, just leads to more suffering. Sometimes there is no answer, and we just have to find a way to live with that Like imagine if you got bitten by a snake. You don't spend your life wondering why the snake bit you. You focus on healing the wound. The snake didn't have a reason to bite you, it just bit you. It wasn't because you were dressed a certain way. It wasn't something about your personality. It wasn't something about how you looked. It just bit you And you can spend your whole life wondering why you got bitten, or you can focus on getting better. And I'm done with wondering why. Bad things happen to good people all the time, and there's plenty of saints and sages that have had cancer. Not that I'm comparing myself, but just saying having an exceptional spiritual practice, being a kind person, doing the inner work, none of that's a guarantee. The rain falls on all of us, and none of us are getting out of here alive And once you really sit with that, not as a cliche, but an actual fact, something quietens the need that you have to have earned your suffering or explain it or trace it back to something you did wrong It just starts to disappear. It doesn't matter so much. The fact that I probably won't live to be 100 doesn't keep me up at night anymore, and I'm okay with that. Not because I've given up, but I've stopped making longevity the whole point of being here.

And what I've come to instead is this:

I've been handed a certain set of playing cards, and each time I've been dealt a difficult hand, I had a choice on how to play it The first diagnosis, I played hard got on with things. The second diagnosis, I learned to lean on support. The third time, I surrendered, and I stopped trying to win the game and started playing it differently. How we play the game matters so much more than the cards we're dealt. We'll all be lucky at times and unlucky at other times. The hand always changes. What stays consistent is whether you're paying attention when it does. And the latest round showed me something I couldn't have seen any other way, that we can genuinely come back from a shitty hand, and that setback isn't the end of the story And on Tuesday afternoons, I pick Ruby up from kindy and we go play in the local park It's something we do most weeks if it's not raining. She was on the swing. She was laughing at something, kicking her legs, completely unaware that mummy was standing there having a moment, because that's what it's all been about. Not certainty that nothing bad will ever happen again, just an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in the park. The sword is still there over my head, it always will be. But there's something you learn that when you've been afraid of dying, and that's how to be completely here in the backyard, in the park, on a Tuesday afternoon. Ruby doesn't need a perfect mother; she needs a present one, and I know how to do that more now in a way that I didn't before So if you've been through something hard, you've probably asked the same question, " Why me? Why this?" Maybe you even wonder if you deserved it. Maybe you found a framework that helped. Maybe there was an explanation that sat right with you Use whatever helps to make your own meaning. But if you're still turning the question over, still searching for that answer that will finally make it make sense, I wanna offer you something. The mind loves to find meaning. It's relentless about it, and sometimes that search is useful. Sometimes it's just another way of being in control. Sometimes there is no answer And the peace you're looking for isn't on the other side of finding the answer, it's learning to live with it. You don't have to earn your suffering And there wasn't something that you did for you to deserve it. You don't have to explain it or trace it back to something you did wrong. Bad things happen to good people all the time. It's how you decide to play the hand that you've been dealt, that's where your power actually lives And if you're done with the why and you're ready to work on the how, if you're ready to reclaim your energy, if you're ready to stop outsourcing your happiness on external things, that's what Energy Alchemy is. It's built from everything I went through, the exact practices I used to climb out of a deep, dark hole. Structure for people who are ready to do that inner work. It starts in the body, in the energy field, and works outward from there If you're feeling the call, then enrollments are closing soon. The link is in the show notes So thank you for being here. In the next episode, I wanna talk about grief, not as something to get through, but something that you learn to live with and what it does to the people closest to you when it's your grief they're carrying. But one last thing before you go. If this show has given you something this season, it would really help me if you left a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It would really help me reach new listeners, people who are in the dark, people who are having a hard time in rock bottom right now, the people who need to hear this the most, and that's how listeners find this program, when people leave a review. And to thank you for your review, just email me a screenshot, and I'll give you a free week of yoga with me. Until next time. Thanks, my friend.