Why?

Why? This is the question I’ve asked since my diagnosis was confirmed. Not a plaintive ‘why me,’ but a practical question with tangible answers that can help identify the cause so that I can do or not do whatever it was so that it won’t happen again.

Is it the food I eat, the air I breathe, the electromagnetic emissions from computer, cell phone and remote control units I absorb? Does the plastic from the bottle leach into the water I drink; do the toxins in my deodorant, shampoo, conditioner and make-up silently attack my cells? Is it pressure from the tuck in my bath towel that I wrap around my body?

Is it due to a traumatic experience from childhood? Is there something I need to ‘get off my chest’? Do I have a range of negative thoughts which sent my cells on a frenzied journey of malformation? Am I not loved enough or do I not love enough? Am I subconsciously depressed, repressed and stressed?

I believed I had my life under control, that I was treating my body, mind and soul well and that I would be repaid with continued good health. I haven’t smoked for 22 years, I eat vegetables and fruit, fowl and fish, and have abjured eating the flesh of antibiotic and hormonally-fed cows for at least four years. We do not own a microwave oven. I exercised. I meditated. I worked and exercised my brain. I enjoyed fulfilling relationships. I rarely suppressed an opinion but exercised restraint—well, mostly—within the boundaries of acceptable social intercourse. I felt empowered, untrammeled by the insecurities of past years and was willing the remaining years before retirement to pass quickly so I’d could begin to really enjoy myself. Not since I was a teenager did I want time to move so fast. In short, my life was a perfect picture book example of the healthy lifestyle that self-help advocates urge us to adopt after contracting cancer! What irony. Clearly, it wasn’t enough to combat the risk factors...

I belong in quite a few high-risk groups: I am over 50; I have close blood relatives who contracted the disease; I began menstruating early, at the age of 11; and finally, I’d been taking HRT (hormone replacement therapy) for almost 11 years. For most of that time, the HRT was estrogen-based; in the last few years I took a non-estrogen-based therapy. However, cancer develops slowly over a long period, and in all likelihood the provenance of my cancer dates from those early years when all that concerned me was not to endure another hot flush. A combination of all these risk factors with HRT providing the clincher to cause all other risks to shrink and shrivel before it, seem to have outweighed the benefits of the healthy lifestyle that played by all the rules.

It’s been suggested that my cancer was inevitable and that my healthy lifestyle actually deferred the onset of cancer by many years. If this is the case, then I appear to have being doing everything right and all I need to do to live a long life free of cancer is to continue with more of the same - minus the HRT.

I have used various terms throughout this blog to describe myself in regard to living with cancer, most frequently as ‘cancer victim’. As the cancerous lump was scooped out of me by the surgeon, I am presumably cancer-free and all the subsequent treatments are designed to ensure that none of those pesky little cells remain in my body and that new cancerous ones will not develop. I think a more appropriate term is ‘cancer patient.’ ‘Patient’ implies endurance with an unavoidable process while ‘victim’ suggests bitterness.

I do not dismiss the body, mind, spirit connection. One of the women I meet during radiation treatments believes that stress from the Second Lebanon War precipitated the onset of her cancer. Conversely, my brother Tony defied predictions and lived for two and a half years following diagnosis instead of the year that the doctors gave him. I am convinced that my mother, who was almost completely blind, willed herself to die as she felt the increasing frailty of my brother when she hugged him, unable to face the death of yet another child.

If stress is the main factor in triggering cancer, I have never in my life undergone such intense stress as that emanating from contracting the disease itself.