The Cancer Survivors Network (CSN) is a peer support community for cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, families, and friends! CSN is a safe place to connect with others who share your interests and experiences.

A Trick To Help With Fear

anicca
anicca CSN Member Posts: 334 Member
in Ovarian Cancer #1
My mother died of breast cancer when I was 4, and her 3 sisters also died of cancer fairly early, so I grew up in fear that it would be my fate also. One day I realized that I might live to 90, and would have spent all that time in fear. That day I chose to fight the fear and it gradually stopped being a factor in my life. Now I am in fear again, of a recurrence of ovarian cancer. I just now realized that I can play the same game. What if I live for another 20 years without a recurrence, but have spent all that time in fear? I refuse to live in fear. (Now I need to repeat this 20 times every hour!)
Like Care

Comments

  • kikz
    kikz CSN Member Posts: 1,345 Member
    #2
    I'm with you.
    I try very hard to live in the now. We cannot control what might happen but we can make every effort to live the way we want to right now.

    Karen
    Like Care
  • Christine B.
    Christine B. CSN Member Posts: 137
    #3
    Okay Anicca
    Yours is a much better "what if" than the ones I come up with in my fears. Lately I have felt like I might be cut short on doing the things I should have done to help make this a better world. What if that's not true and I have lost that time to my fears?
    Thank you!
    Christine
    Like Care
  • Tina Brown
    Tina Brown CSN Member Posts: 1,036 Member
    #4
    Hello Anicca
    I so love your atittude. I am of a similar mind. Over the last 2 / 3 years I have begun to experience fear and anxiety. Not just from my own diagnosis but other life changing things that have happened to me. It sometimes seems I am living in constant fear and it was/is the worse ever feeling. So like you I realised that I was wasting my life being frightened. It is hard because it is like a wave that you can't control but once I think to myself that "it is just a feeling and it will go away soon" I am learning how to cope.

    You are very brave to have lost people close to you and to now have a battle on yourself. Once you can accept you have cancer and can live with it it kinda fades into the background some days. It becomes a new way of living. And yes - I refuse to live in fear.

    Love Tina xx
    Like Care
  • childofthestars
    childofthestars CSN Member Posts: 251 Member
    #5
    Fear
    I so agree with you on this and was just thinking the other day about 'wasting my life' fearing the what if scenario.
    I try very hard to look to the future but it does get HARD sometimes BUT I just try and accept this and let myself be 'fearful' for a day and then move on!
    Michelle x
    Like Care

Discussion Boards