What If I Feel That Mу Body Has Failed Me?
In your mind, your body has failed you by allowing you to get cancer. Most of your friends did not get cancer. No matter how many wonderful skills your body demonstrated before, during, or after your cancer, pride in your body can be lost in the reality that your body got cancer.
Has My Body Really Failed Me?
Failure is a subjective conclusion. If you believe that nobody should get cancer, you will probably feel that your body failed you. However, if you realize that cancer has been threatening human life for millennia, you will see cancer as one of the potential threats for all people, along with infections and accidents.
Rather than failing you, your body sustained you despite the threat of cancer and the risks of cancer therapy. Your body overcame a challenge it did not want and for which it did not prepare.
You are surviving. Instead of blaming your body for getting cancer, congratulate it for surviving cancer and its treatment.
Is It Common to Feel like Damaged Goods?
Many cancer survivors feel that they are damaged goods. The so-called damage may be painfully obvious, such as loss of voice, fertility, limb, speech, breast, continence, or sexual function. In other cases the losses are subtle or invisible to the outside observer, such as lost stamina, spontaneity, self-esteem, or confidence in the future.
You may look and feel perfectly normal and yet still see yourself as damaged goods. After all, you have had cancer and could develop it again. The knowledge that some cancer patients have a genetic predisposition to their and other cancers may just reinforce your self-perception of being damaged goods.
Future health risks are not unique to cancer survivors. All people have their risk factors, be it their risk for stroke, heart attack, emphysema, rheumatoid arthritis, kidney disease, or manic-depressive disorder. Cancer survivors can learn to see cancer as just one of the risk factors they need to consider in their health maintenance and preventive medicine measures.
Loss and change, too, are not unique to cancer survivors. Many diseases are accompanied by loss and change. You are no more damaged than someone with a history of heart disease or lupus. Quite often the quality of life and prognosis for someone with heart disease or lupus is worse than for someone with many types of cancer. In our society, still, the word “cancer” carries stronger connotations of suffering and death than the words “heart disease” or “lupus.”
Nobody is perfect. To be normal is to be flawed.
*150/32/5*
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