Small Grief's Along the Way (Part 1)

 Part 1: Loss of Confidence
Often times with aging or any serious medical condition, it can be difficult to tell in real time when one starts to lose their abilities, or grieve things one was once able to do. When one is diagnosed with cancer or some other threatening medical condition, hindsight is always 20/20, and looking back you can often see that symptoms and the grief surrounding them were present if you only knew what to look for.
 
Often, when a diagnosis hits, such as with Kim, and life all of a sudden speeds up, you can get completely lost in the day-to-day. Trying to navigate the new stormy waters of appointments, research, treatments, sharing news with people close to you and getting yourself ready for the unknown ahead. Because of this there is very little time for introspection. You're simply in survival mode. But with the passage of time, and the need to begin to process the experience, you begin to notice all the small griefs and losses along the way; things you experienced but never fully realized or put into words at the time.  
 
I don’t know if it was THE first grief we experienced when cancer entered our lives, but close to it, was a loss of confidence in Kim’s body. What I mean by this is the ability to NOT notice all the little aches, pains, sounds or twitches that all of our bodies make throughout the day. Cancer makes you lose the ability of ignoring all of these perfectly normal aspects in living in a physical body. When things go wrong, that innocence is lost, and it is often replaced with an obsessing over every little bodily abnormality.
 
The human body is capable of incredible things. It is constantly doing things we aren’t aware of, and the regular things we are aware of, well, more often than not we don’t give them too much thought. When we are considered healthy, or without a medical history, things like wheezing or becoming short of breath is chalked up to allergies or being a little over tired. Aches in muscles or bones are given the excuses of aging or doing something we are not used to. Again, shrugged off without too much second thought. Stomach and digestive issues are given many different perfectly plausible excuses. Maybe something we ate not agreeing with us, food poisoning that will pass, eating too much or drinking a bit too much. Anything more serious is often just chalked up to IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).  And the incredibly vast majority of the time these excuses and reasons are all bang on. Cancer is on the rise and becoming more common, it is one of the reasons we feel inspired to do this fundraiser, but it is not nearly as common as all the different things we might feel in our body on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The body is amazing, and the number of things it can absorb without too much of a second thought is astounding.
 
But when cancer became a personal diagnosis for Kim, and for myself as her husband, all of a sudden the daily and normal aches and pains, random digestion anomalies or moments of feeling short of breath all become moments of panic, things to be examined and obsessed over. Anxiety about another potential growth, wondering if the cancer cells were congregating and growing somewhere new. We had lost confidence that all the things Kim felt in her body could just be normal everyday things we all go through. There is something so blissful about ignorance.
 
When cancer entered the conversation, the innocence of ignoring or chalking things up to “that’s just what the body does” was lost, and we began to worry about everything. Everything happening within the body, but also everything happening outside the body. How much rest is too much? How much do we need to change our diet? How much should Kim be working? What does it mean when she feels this pain, or that weird sensation or pressure? All of sudden Kim forgot what it felt like to have a body without the cloud of cancer hanging over it. Hundreds of thought and concerns flittering through our minds each day as we became more and more aware of all the little things the body does, the vast majority of which are totally, organically, normal.
 
And so, there was a loss of general confidence in how her body should feel to her. We became aware, and at least in the beginning, questioning and analyzing everything with much fear and anxiety. Kim had to relearn what her body felt like. What was normal, what needed paying attention to and what could be left alone as the new normal. But the blissful ignorance of having a healthy body and not giving too much of a second thought to this or that, that reality was gone, left behind on the day we entered the cancer clinic for the first time.