Cancer As a Call to Love

For me, cancer was a call to love. A call for me to love myself and to learn to love my body, mind, and spirit back to health. Also, to learn to love, period. Full stop!

Sure, I knew how to love. I loved my mom and dad. I loved my siblings. I loved my husband and oh how I loved my children! But cancer taught me that I didn’t really love myself enough. Because I didn’t think I was enough! It also taught me that everything I do and say is about love and that I have a choice to be loving or to be in fear.

It wasn’t until my second diagnosis. The body, mind and spirit shattering diagnosis of stage IV cancer. Metastatic. Terminal. That is some serious news to wrap one's head around. It felt like a death sentence when I heard it.

The early-stage diagnosis was bad enough and, at that time, also felt like a death sentence. Because that is what we all think cancer is. It’s not until you live through that, that you begin to see it’s not. But once that cancer metastasizes to other parts of your body, you really find out what a death sentence feels like. Shattering is the best way I can describe it.

We don’t die of early-stage breast cancer. We die when it metastasizes. When it becomes stage IV. But some of us don’t die then either. I’m proof that it is not always a death sentence. Some forms of metastatic breast cancer (MBC) can be managed like a chronic disease. There are medications and lifestyle changes that make it possible to live with some metastatic cancer.

Our journeys in this life are not all the same and the lessons we need to learn and the way we learn them is as varied as we are. While not everyone will be cured, some of us will be cured, but not truly healed. In the best scenarios, we will be cured and healed.

Now, let’s get back to the love talk! Love was my lesson and I suspect it is everyone’s lesson in one form or another because there is either love or there is fear at the base of everything! Yes, EVERYTHING!

My second diagnosis taught me that I needed to learn to truly love and respect myself. Love myself for who I am, even straight out of the shower wet and naked (i.e., no hair, makeup, or beautiful clothes and high heels to armor me up). I previously felt unworthy if I wasn’t wearing that armor. I felt unworthy if I wasn’t hustling for attention and praise. I didn’t realize I was enough just as I was until after the crises of my MBC diagnosis and the therapy I went through in 2015.

Therapy helped me to learn to love myself. To be enough. To love myself flaws and all…without my armor. My story is the story of the lessons cancer has taught me…and continues to teach me. It’s how I came to realize it’s all about love.

What have you, or what can you, learn from your diagnosis?

In peace, love and health,

Karla