The Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance Blog | January 17 201
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”
-Mark Twain
I hear it often from people, how brave I am and how much courage I have. Sometimes I just have to laugh, because, going through what I’ve been through with my mesothelioma battle, I don’t feel very brave. At times, the fear was so overwhelming, all I could do was cry out to God to help me. I would love to say that through the last 7 years, I’ve learned to conquer my fears. After all, Lungleavin Day, our celebration of the anniversary of my extrapleural pneumonectomy surgery, is all about overcoming fears. But I still have my moments, more often than I would like to admit. I have the usual fears creep in, my “scanxiety” I’ve blogged about before, little pangs of fear before I fly, but the biggest fear I struggle with is the fear of something happening to my daughter. This is something that has plagued me since she was born.
I’ve always had what I jokingly call puke-aphobia and, with having a kid, you know it something you have to deal with. This year has been particularly brutal on the gastroenteritis front for my poor Lily. Three times she has been sick this year in as many months. When she got sick the third time, the fear reared its ugly head in a big bad way. So much that I took her to the doctor and insisted he do a battery of tests to rule out anything. The thing I was most afraid of? Yep, cancer. Having dealt with cancer myself, and knowing so many others, my hypochondriac mind went right to the worst-case scenario. My husband, bless his heart, is always able to bring me back around to reasonable thinking. Although he understands why I go to the worst-case scenario, he doesn’t indulge it, and his voice of sound reason helps so much to calm me. Except in this case. I could not shake the feeling that something was seriously wrong. Turns out he was right. She is a perfectly healthy 7-year-old little girl. Every single test came back as normal as normal as could be and, for some reason, she has just gotten sick a lot this year.