Regaining control
September 11, 2014
By: Noémie Robidoux
It’s November 2012. I have been at my job for a few months, and I love the work I do every day. I am gaining confidence in myself. I am becoming more at ease, I am beginning to take flight, I am in control. The fall is sudden and hard. Diagnosis: cancer, right hip, caused by the radiotherapy I received 10 years ago. Loss of control.
I’ve always been very much on top of my own medical file. There is not one medication, not one test that I have taken without my full understanding of its necessity, its dosage and duration. I thought I was in control. I was careful not to share my inner turmoil: I needed to be strong, positive. I prided myself in my ability to maintain such self-control.
Then I had my operation. Over 7 hours spent on the operating table while they removed the left bone from my pelvis. When I woke up, I was plugged in everywhere: IV, epidural, surgical tube and drain. My body was exhausted. It was using all the energy I could muster to heal the huge wound that now adorns my left hip, and to fight the pain and metabolise the medications. No energy was left to hold up the wall I had built around me. I lost control. I was in a state of vulnerability like none I had ever known. I depended on others for everything.
I was so sensitive. I cried all the time: when I was scared, when I hurt. I became anxious, impatient, and pessimistic. My difficult start in physiotherapy left me imagining a dark and dreary future, confined to a wheelchair, unable to leave home.
When I no longer recognized myself, when I could no longer look behind me to see all that I had lived through, others did it for me. Extraordinary people believed in me. With patience and determination, family, friends, medical and psychosocial personnel helped me remember who I was, what I had accomplished and what I could accomplish still. When I wasn’t satisfied with my progress, they helped me remember all that I had overcome, and reminded me that I had reason to be proud. The more they repeated it, the more I started to believe them. And the more I believed them, the more I started to believe in myself as well.
In the beginning of 2014, my attitude had changed enough that I could take things into my own hands. I had a reassuring certainty that the coming year would be a good one, that it would be full of changes that would do me good. I was regaining control. The cancer was a few months behind me already and I made it my business to find the best ways to prevent it from coming back. I read books, I watched documentaries, I visited websites. I started to transform my life. I changed my nutrition, I developed my sense of spirituality, I reinforced my positive attitude. And I am grateful. I am grateful every day that life is still here, I am grateful to meet wonderful people, and to still have a whole world of possibilities before me.
There are many things that we cannot control in life, including illness and all its effects. But there is one thing we can control: our attitude. My mother taught me this in 2003 when I had my first cancer. We and we alone can decide how we face the day. The right attitude sometimes requires a lot of effort, but even when it’s a little forced, it helps us to see color in the gray and light in the dark. The choice is ours.
