I arrived at work on a seemingly ordinary day on Thursday, May 21st, but found myself unable to think or concentrate at all. I felt a lot of nervous energy and anxiety building, but didn't know why. I had also started having cancer-related nightmares in the previous week, as if to predict something rotten coming. It turned out that this particular day was my last two days of chemotherapy, four years ago, and I remember those days all too well.
Cancer Survivorship - The Fight after the Fight and All of its Firsts
After our fights with cancer are over, we all want so badly to believe that everything is behind us and that life is going to get back to normal. Those first weeks and months after our cancer fights are such a precious time. It’s our first taste of freedom after having been wrongfully held hostage by cancer for so long. I had my life back, but as time and the months went on I realized that it wasn’t my old life that I had back, but rather an entirely new one. Cancer survivorship brings with it an entirely new set of life circumstances and a whole lot of firsts, many of which I was completely unprepared to handle or to deal with at all.
The Best Way to Survive Cancer, Is to LIVE!
If there's one thing I've learned over the years as a cancer survivor, and just one thing I could say or one piece of advice I could give to cancer survivors everywhere who might be struggling in these challenging new lives as I had been, it's that the best way to survive cancer is to live the best possible life that you can.
Steve Pake's Top 10 Guide to Surviving a Young Adult Cancer
At the start of 2014, after suffering from a year of such terrible anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress, I finally had my life figured out again after cancer. I was in the midst of this moment of clarity where I had an intimate understanding of all that had gone wrong in my cancer survivorship and why, and all that had gone right as well. I couldn't afford to let this moment of clarity go to waste, because never again in my life did I want to suffer as I had throughout so much of 2013, hurting as I had been, yet not knowing what to do. After four months of writing, I finally released this essay into the world, and was happy to see it spread far and wide. If you only ever read one thing from me, let this be it.