Surviver guilt

August 8, 2013
By: Sarah Haque

My mother loves to tell the story of taking me to our pediatrician when I was a toddler. He told her that for such a young age I was abnormally empathetic, and that children so young don’t usually understand empathy. After being diagnosed with stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, this empathy came back to bite me in the ass, hard.

Shortly after I finished treatment I began experiencing more anxiety than I was used to. I’ve always been a somewhat anxious person, but was never one to have panic attacks. When I attended YACC’s Retreat Yourself East in 2012, two amazing women did a presentation on anxiety. While they were discussing some of the reasons we have anxiety and how to cope with it, I realized this was a problem I had been having as of late but hadn’t really been aware of.

Survivor’s guilt kicked in almost as soon as I heard that coveted word, “remission.” I never believed it was fair that I wasn’t sick anymore, that I would live when so many others hadn’t and wouldn’t. I tried to discuss it with some friends but many of them didn’t understand and instead told me to feel lucky that I was alive. I did feel lucky and I still feel lucky, but despite my feelings of luck, I feel immense guilt.

Recently, in a short period of time, I was constantly being bombarded with others who were sick or had been sick. I met a young child at work who had spent the last two years in the hospital undergoing treatments for Leukemia. He could not have been older than 10. I could see the worry on his mother’s face as she asked me how I was feeling, and asked for information about my rates of recurrence and other possible illnesses that I may be more susceptible to as her son now was. I left work shortly after and had a minor panic attack in my car. Later that week a woman from Sick Kids came in to work to do a small presentation, as we were in the process of raising funds for the hospital and she felt this would help us. Shortly after she began telling the story of a very young girl who had been treated at their hospital, I had to leave as I was in the midst of another panic attack. I had about three panic attacks in a two-week period and they all lead back to my survivor’s guilt.

I asked my mom why this one thing kept leading me to these anxiety attacks and her answer was, “Because you’re extremely empathetic.” I asked her, “How do I turn that off?” She looked at me and said, “You don’t.” I have been thinking about that answer a lot lately. Maybe I did want to turn off that empathy in that moment, but I don’t know who I would be without empathy and I believe it is one of my greatest qualities. No, it is not healthy for me to have panic attacks, and the survivor’s guilt is an awful feeling, but it lets me know that I am still alive and that I still have the ability to care about others, even those I have never met.