Oliver: Living with cancer means aiming for balance amid emotional challenges

So much of life is about maintaining one’s balance. When unforeseen circumstances occur, we want to neither overreact nor fail to react at all.

This is especially true when it comes to living with a cancer diagnosis. Beyond the steps that physically are taken to identify the cancer, extract the cancer and then to try to prevent any more cancer from developing, there are also the mental and emotional challenges that come with life with cancer.

Is there any more cancer lurking in my body? Will something come back and when? In a year? In 10 years? Am I ever going to be free of this?

Cancer also isn’t the same for everyone. Sure, it’s a disease that strikes fear into the hearts of just about everyone, but a stage 1 diagnosis is clearly not the same as a stage 4 one. Although most people automatically assume that when you say you have cancer you’re on death’s door.

Maybe that’s because we usually hear about cancer when someone famous dies of it. This can be especially jarring and frightening when that person just happens to have the same cancer that you do. Even worse, when that person is right around your own age.

This happened to me recently. Actress Shannen Doherty, who was 53, died of breast cancer on July 13. She had appeared in popular shows such as “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Charmed.” I must admit that I didn’t watch either show, so beyond knowing who she was in a pop culture sort of way, I really didn’t know too much about her.

However, when I heard about the breast cancer, I did what I’m sure a lot of us cancer fighters do. I immediately wanted the kind of details a quick news report usually fails to give. When was she diagnosed? What kind of breast cancer did she have? What stage was it? How long did she have it before it came back?

These are not the sort of details that the average person needs. But when you have cancer, it’s easy to want to measure everyone else’s case with your own, as if you are reading tea leaves.

Of course, it just doesn’t work like that. The fact that Doherty began her cancer journey in 2015 with a mastectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation, indicates that her situation was very serious from the outset. No doubt she felt hopeful when in 2017 she was declared to be in remission.

One of the scariest parts of this disease is that one just never knows whether it will return. For Doherty, it returned in 2019 and a year later, she announced that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic cancer. By 2023, the cancer had spread to her bones.

Doherty had been planning to undergo another round of chemotherapy, and she didn’t know how long that would last.

Sadly, cancer can be like that. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that it isn’t always like that.

In my own case, with cancer that is definitely on the less serious end of the scale, the danger becomes not minimizing the cancer out of existence. I’m afraid that’s exactly what I did five years ago when I had a double lumpectomy followed by weeks of radiation treatments. When I began my medication regimen, I figured that I’d take the meds for five years and then I’d be done with all of this.

Except that I was diagnosed with more breast cancer in March of this year. So much for my five-year plan. Still, it was caught early and after more surgeries and more radiation, I can start the clock again and hope that my cancer doesn’t return.

Here’s where the balance becomes crucial. Cancer is a serious disease, no matter in what stage one finds oneself. However, even in extreme cases, it can be overcome. Then again, sometimes even less serious cases can progress over time to become life-threatening.

Perhaps that’s why the best course of action seems to be to remain in the present, to tackle this challenge one step at a time. To be diligent in being screened to make sure that the cancer is caught early if it does return. And to follow the protocol to beat it.

Anything beyond that is out of our control.

• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.