Diagnosis of cancer forces you to decide quickly what really matters

By David McElroy · January 16, 2012

Two weeks from today, a surgeon will cut me open and remove a lump from my left breast. Few things will focus your attention on what matters in life as quickly as finding out that you have cancer cells growing in your body.

Just a few weeks ago, I noticed a lump under the skin on the left side of my chest. It seemed to just show up without warning one day. After seeing several doctors in the time since then, I found out Thursday that there were cancerous cells in that mass. It’s not the sort of thing that anyone expects, so there’s no way to be prepared for such news.

Breast cancer is about 100 times more common in women than in men. In men, it’s not as likely to spread to other parts of the body as the female version of the disease is. I probably have a greater risk of being killed in a car accident in the next five years than I do of having this thing kill me. Still, it’s one of those things that gets your attention and makes you think seriously about what matters to you.

Until last Tuesday, it still wasn’t striking me that it even could be cancer. I knew it was a theoretical possibility, but I just assumed it would be a benign cyst of some sort. I’ve known other people who’ve found such lumps and had to have surgery to have them removed, but they’ve always turned out to be benign. That’s what I assumed would be the case for me.

One of the lower-level doctors had come in to tell me that another doctor — the specialist — would be coming in to stick a needle into me to get some tissue for a biopsy. He left and I was alone in the room to wait. For some reason, I’ve never felt as alone as I felt in the minutes I waited. I can’t say it was surreal. Instead, it was hyper-real, as though I was more aware of everything than I’ve ever been.

All of a sudden — without even thinking about it consciously — I was very aware of which things in life truly mattered to me. And which things didn’t matter.

First and foremost on my mind was Her. You don’t need to know who she is. It wouldn’t matter to you. I knew beyond all question that what I most wanted was to have Her with me. Why? She couldn’t have changed what was about to happen. She couldn’t have affected the diagnosis. It wasn’t pragmatic. It wasn’t something I could really explain. I just knew that if I could have relived my life, I would have changed whatever I had to change — just so she could be there.

There are so many things that bother me every day, but those things haven’t bothered me in the same way since then. Maybe they’ll start bugging me again as I put more distance between myself and the initial realization of what’s going on. I don’t know. I hope I can hold onto this vivid distinction about what matters and what doesn’t, because it’s a much calmer, saner and pleasant way to live.

I didn’t tell anyone the news until Thursday. When I told Her, she asked me whether it made me think about mortality. I hadn’t consciously considered the question, but I immediately knew the answer. It’s definitely made me think about the limits of life — about the relative briefness of it — but not in the way we normally think of when we speak of mortality.

Most of the time when people talk about mortality, they’re talking about the end of life — about death. It hasn’t made me think about death. It’s made me think about life instead, but in the sense of wondering why it’s taken me this long to really start getting clear on some things that matter to me. Why didn’t I know five years ago? Or three years ago? Or even a year ago?

I suspect it’s simply because we have the unspoken assumption that life goes on and on and on, so we act as though we have forever to actually start getting serious about doing the things we want to do. Although I still believe I’m going to live a long and healthy life after this — with a big scar on the left side of my chest — I also look to the past and wonder why I’ve wasted so much time thus far.

Was it wasted time? Insofar as accomplishing much, yes, it was. Maybe I had to go through that “wasted time” to become mature enough and wise enough to learn what my priorities are. I’m not sure. I just know that it still makes me laugh to apply words such as “mature” and “wise” to myself.

I’m not looking forward to surgery or to the recovery period. I don’t mind admitting that I’m a wimp when it comes to the idea of being cut on. But what if this is the price I have to pay to clarify what matters most to me? What if the moments of clarity in that exam room last Tuesday and then the phone call from the doctor on Thursday were the beginnings of real life? The end of wasting too much time on things that don’t matter?

If that’s the case, it will be worth it. I have a short list of priorities now that I’m completely clear about. I have a new sense of the importance of love and life and the things I feel called to do. In those ways, maybe this can be the beginning of living my life as I’d really like to — rather than feeling as though I’m wasting too many days and weeks and even years.

I’ll let you know more when there’s news to tell.

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I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

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