Is there any other way to deal with a diagnosis? For me it is the only way that I can deal with living with Metastatic Breast Cancer. I knew about the Bristol Approach before my diagnosis through information sent to a friend with stomach cancer, so when I had a diagnosis of cancer I knew where to start looking.
If you believe that conventional medicine has all the answers that is fine with me. If I have learned anything it is that we all have to find our own way of dealing with cancer, and that there most certainly is not a 'one size fits all' way of doing this. Over time I have moved cancer from being at the centre of my thoughts and life, to a place on the edge of my life where we can co-exist. I have faced the reality that it will never leave me, and that in the long run it may succeed, but in the mean time I am going to make the most of what I do have and try to heal myself in so many other ways. It has been through that healing that the cancer has been moved to the out edge of my personal galaxy and I am hoping that it will take a long time for it to make a comeback to the centre of my life.
Life, of course, is the world's worst sexually transmitted disease. It gets us all in the end and there are no guarantees about what will happen in our life. I know that many people loath the analogy that they could be hit by a bus tomorrow (especially the way that some of them are driven these days) but it is true. None of up were given an expiry date, so slowly I have come to ignore the statistics which say I have been dead for the last two years and I just get on with living and the knowledge that right here and right now I am OK, that I am safe and that I can find the joy in being alive. Cancer may not be the life that we wanted, but it is the LIFE that we have so we just have to get on and live it. I no longer fret about my lost future because I now realise that I was never promised it in the first place. I may have passed my Best Before date, but I am a long way from the expiry date and this is partly because I have empowered myself to find ways of moving the finishing line!
