It turns out that one of the most important changes I made to my life, was the one thing I’d never thought I’d ever be able to do. Meditation. For me meditation meant sitting still – a thing I’ve dreaded for most of my life – and sitting still was hard. It meant listening to my breath, my blood and my heart pumping the blood through my heart. For some reason this was for decades the most terrifying thing to have to experience.
Until coincidence intervened. An old friend I hadn’t seen in years turned up on my doorstep the same day as my diagnosis from the hospital – it had taken nearly 8 weeks for all the tests to be done to get there. – Here she was, she said, in ‘one final attempt’ to preserve our friendship.
In the weeks that followed she gave me a book that she couldn’t seem to use herself. The book was by Jon Kabat-Zinn – ‘Full catastrophe living’. Who knew this book would get me to meditate for the first time in my life?
What did I have to lose? I devoured that book. The first of many on how to cope with extreme stress, and extreme life situations.
So began my adventure to thrive regardless of stage 4 breast cancer that had metastasized to my sacrum bone. Or notably, as its technically referred to: oligo-metastasis – the only breast cancer at stage 4 considered ‘curable’ in conventional medicine.
At that time of course, I hadn’t yet learned why my oncologist had said on the day of my diagnosis: ‘we’re going to cure you’ (a statement the surgeon later corrected) Which, I learned many months later, is one of the best situations statistically speaking you can get if cancer has already metastasized. Living up to that prognosis however, being a test of time.