The Emotional Rollercoaster That Is Dealing with Cancer

Jul 22, 2024
5 min read

When they say that "Cancer is not for the faint of heart", they mean it. It just turns your whole life upside-down, flips it in reverse, and then dumps you off a cliff - and not in a fun thrilling rollercoaster type of way. More like a tragic driving off a cliff at the end of a movie - think Thelma and Louise.

I'm sure there are lots of diseases that do this to people, but personally, I think that cancer just has a way of taking down the individual in a way that is uniquely exhausting because it is a FULL BODY Experience taking over your mind, body, and spirit.

The body is probably the easiest thing to talk about so let's start there. I find that I'm so uncomfortable all the time - my joints are achy, the little hairs on my head feel like they are standing on end & swaying in the breeze, and while I'm hungry, my stomach hurts when I eat and when I don't. It's all a very confusing mix of contracting feelings inside your own body. It makes me feel like an alien or going through my really awkward teenage years again...... which is an experience no one wants to repeat.

There's also the issue of feeling not quite all the way there physically. I find that during treatment I become much more clumsy - running into things more, missing corners, ending up with mysterious bruises. This weekend, for instance, I ran right into a door as I was exiting the bedroom at my parent's house - in the "before times", this wouldn't have happened, but because I'm so off balance, I was too far to the left and ran right into it. It's very frustrating to never feel quite centered in your body or like you're always just a little off-kilter.

Now this isn't to say this happens all the time every day. But I do find that it's most prevalent in the days right after treatment, which is part of the reason why I try not to plan anything in those 4-5 days right after chemo day. On days when my sleep is poor or I'm particularly stressed, that out-of-body feeling becomes more intense & I can definitely be a space cadet for a bit. But even if everything goes perfectly, this feeling will just come up out of nowhere like a bolt out of the blue. Sometimes the alien feeling creeps up without warning in the 2nd or 3rd week of my treatment cycle.

Unfortunately, I haven't figured out a good method to combat this particular symptom other than taking more time to rest - which if you know me, is INCREDIBLY difficult. In talking to my doctors about it, this type of reaction is not unusual, so from a "should I be concerned" standpoint, I'm good. But it does make the rest of my life feel a little bit harder sometimes - and some days so much harder than is necessary.

With the physical, comes the mental and emotional side of things. I'll tell you honestly, I'm not good at the emotional stuff. If you're into star sign stuff, I'm a Virgo and I have always thought that the traits have aligned well with me.

I find that I'm a bit of a contradiction - I both feel deeply and can put those emotions at arm's length as well as analyze them to DEATH. I want to be vulnerable with the people that I love and yet in person, I can't quite get there. I think that's part of the reason why I like writing this blog so much. It allows me a place to be vulnerable but no one is looking at me. And don't even get me started on asking people for help - I would rather gnaw off my own foot.

I bring all this up to say that while it may look like I'm smooth sailing on the surface, on the inside, my emotions are all over the place, and sometimes that spills out in unpredictable ways. While I feel like I'm much better at it than I used to be, I try not to bottle my emotions up because I tend to let them build up too much and explode - you'll have to check with my husband to get a real sense of how I'm doing on that. While I don't do it intentionally, I know that I've hurt people with my outbursts & I often will beat myself up for days after a fight or argument - especially if the blow-up was with my husband.

The trickiest part about dealing with cancer is that everyday stressors that typically wouldn't bother me become next level overwhelming and it just piles on, and piles on, and piles on. And unfortunately, there's no pill or patch or magic bean that will make some of these stressors and the anxieties that come with them go away as much as I want them to.

Sadly, I don't have any advice on how to effectively deal with these issues. I've read some strategies about how to manage emotions when they are high - and sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the best solution is a snack and a nap. Sometimes the best solution is to go listen to some screaming music in the car. Sometimes I'll just sit in the shower and cry. Whenever I get on this particular part of the flipping rollercoaster, I'm just as surprised as everyone else.

PS - for those who have been in the path of my emotional hurricane, I'm so sorry... I promise I wasn't trying to hurt anyone with my words or actions. I probably hated myself for a while after. I ask for your forgiveness and grace in the future.

Last but not least, we get to the mental part of the rollercoaster. This is perhaps the part that I'm able to articulate because I'm very good at understanding my own mind - for better or worse. Let's start off with the fact I have both depression and anxiety. My therapist and I describe it as two sides of the same coin - the control coin. When things are out of my control, I get both sad and stressed - sometimes in equal measure, sometimes not. And my way of coping is not to lay down and bed rot - rather it is to throw myself into things that I can control.

As you might imagine, cancer is not something I can control (an understatement of a lifetime) and with it brings intense feelings of sadness and loss of agency. All the suggestions of "focus on what you can control" are helpful up to a point - but when the thing you're losing control of is your own body, how do you even start tackling that? Right now, for me, I live in a perpetual state of anxiety and depression - mixed with a fair amount of rage. Some days I'm able to keep it in check, other days it overwhelms me, and other days I try to get a little dopamine fix with some Amazon shopping.

Sadly, this is another area where I don't have a whole lot of advice or tips to make it better because I'm still trying to figure it out myself. What I do know is these intense feelings will pass, I just have to get through them. And if I can keep reminding myself of that, sometimes every 5 seconds, then maybe I'll make it through to tomorrow.

LOVE YOU LOTS

OLIVIA