I Don’t Feel Like a Warrior
When you feel like this, “warrior” is not the first thing that comes to mind.
Why the language of cancer survivorship is all wrong.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but survivor, thriver, warrior, and fighter really hurt me.
Or, even worse, you got this. Let me explain.
I remember being a couple of months out of treatment for breast cancer and investigating why I started having severe migraines. I went for an orthopedist appointment, where they did X-Rays and concluded I needed an MRI.
By this point I’d had every type of test imaginable. And I was very upfront with the medical team. I said to the doctor, “I am bald because I just finished breast cancer treatment. I have severe anxiety around any scans. You need to communicate everything to me as soon as you know any information, and if you see my eyes start to glaze over, I am freaking out and not hearing anything you are saying.”
As promised, he called me the minute he got the report. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but the radiologist had not read it yet so it was not official. Later that evening, I was sitting on the couch with my kids watching Peppa Pig, and my phone rang.
“Ms. Lanzito, it’s Ben. Remember I told you the radiologist had not read the report and there is a chance we could be calling you back.” I was silent — partly because I couldn’t breathe and partly because I didn’t remember him telling me this. He said there were two spots on my spinal cord, and with my history, they needed to take another look.
“I know you get really nervous, so I called ahead, and they can get you in in 20 minutes if you can get there.” It was January in Chicago, a snow storm was underway, roads were bad, and I was hyperventilating. Still, I was out the door in .2 seconds and grateful for my Midwestern upbringing that taught me how to drive through snow with purpose. The ice cold MRI room held the warmest technician in the history of technicians, yet even she couldn’t get my tears to stop flowing. I got on the table, our eyes met, and right before she pressed the button to wheel me into the machine, she said, “You got this.”
It’s a good thing she wheeled me into that loud-ass machine, because I shot her a death stare and mumbled MF’s at her under my breath. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, “You want to know what I got? Crippling anxiety, insurmountable fear and complete rage because people keep telling me I am all these things that I am not.”
The Wrong Words
You know all those vocabulary words and phrases people hurl at “survivors” because they have been through a cancer diagnosis and treatment? Survivor. Thriver. Warrior. Fighter. I never felt like a single one of them.
Truth be told, I was barely surviving my days without a couple of meltdowns at minimum. Thriving, How are you thriving so fast? I’m not, and it makes me feel like there is something wrong with me. Warrior, all I can think of is yoga, and I hate yoga. I cannot for the life of me quiet my mind. Fighter, ha! I’m so fucking tired fighting myself not to go down a rabbit hole and trying to convince myself everything is going to be fine, I have no fight left in me. (Cue that goddamn fight song that’s used in a million movie trailers.)
And look, I know that technician meant well on that day. She was trying to calm me when she saw me in distress. But her “You got this” had the opposite effect. I can’t help but think that all these words we use around cancer survivorship are just a little bit off — disconnected from the reality of what people experience in the moment.
Finding the Right Language
So what did I do? I had lunch with one of my childhood friends’ mothers, Mrs. Goldberg.
Mrs. Goldberg had breast cancer years ago and knew the gamut. Her daughter, my childhood friend, had just died of cancer. She knew cancer.
While this could be taking too much liberty, I like to think we were helping each other move through our collective grief and my fear. Mrs. Goldberg has a gracious presence and a palpable strength about her and a deep, deep reservoir of faith — not to mention a scent so familiar that it will stop me dead in my tracks to look around and find her to this very day. To me she is a pillar of strength, and now my literary teacher.
“You know all those vocabulary words and phrases people hurl at ‘survivors’ because they have been through a cancer diagnosis and treatment? Survivor. Thriver. Warrior. Fighter. I never felt like a single one of them.”
I told her I feel like the biggest imposter when people call me all of these powerful words and tell me how brave I am, when I’m not. As we ate cherries on her beautiful china, I told her I wish cancer had chosen someone else; I am not brave enough. I’m scared shitless, and none of those words are resonating with me. They make me feel terrible.
She got up from the dining room table and said, “Follow me.” We walked into the butlers pantry where she got out her giant dictionary and placed it on the counter. She said, “Give me two words: one you can stomach and one that scares you.” I said, “courageous and brave.” I absolutely loathe the word brave. I wouldn’t say I like courageous, but I like it better than brave, so I guess I could stomach it.
We looked up brave first: “Having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear or difficulty.” And then courageous: “Bravery, intrepidity; that quality of mind that enables men/women to encounter danger and difficulties with firmness, or without fear or depressions of spirits; valor; boldness; resolution.”
We closed the book and returned to our cherries. Mrs. Goldberg asked what I thought about the definitions we looked up. I said they were basically the same but I liked courageous better even though it included brave. I like valor and resolution. Somehow courageous to me implies movement whereas brave stops me in my tracks.
I do not embody all of the definition, but this definition states there will be resolve, and that gives me hope. She looked at me and said, “From now on, dear, you are courageous.”
In that moment it felt as if I was 10 years old, sitting at the breakfast table after a sleepover at the Goldbergs. I didn’t have to worry. Those moments when you forget to worry are the universe’s way of giving your soul the brief rest it needs to carry on. So now, when someone calls me a vocabulary word in reference to breast cancer that I don’t like, I say, “Oh, I just tried to be courageous. You got that?”