CANCER: Just Another Reason for a Quarter-Life Crisis

Jun 25, 2008 - 20:59 PM PST

Our great-grand parents were the Lost Generation. We (the twenty-somethings) seem to be the lost cancer generation. Data is collected and statistics are produced about childhood occurrences of cancer. And you can find facts and figures about people 40 years of age and older, but what about us? We fit into the group that is known as “young adults.” Sounds about right, right? Wrong. The young adult group is people from fifteen to 40 years old. That group includes sophomores in high school and (young) grandparents. I don’t know about you, but I have very little in common with those two groups except that I have cancer.

It seems that in the past it was rare to find a twenty-something with cancer. If you found one, very commonly it was someone with Hodgkin’s Disease. Now, I look around my treatment centers (in statistically, a state with one of the nation’s lowest overall occurrences of cancers), and to other people I know and there is me—a 26 year-old with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There is Chris, a 22 year-old with a brain tumor. There is Cameron, a 21 year-old with lymphocytic leukemia. We’re not just a blip on the radar anymore. We’ve got ovarian cancers, breast cancers, stomach cancers, colon cancers and every cancer in between. Cancers that twenty years ago, were affecting mainly our grandparents. We’re becoming fixtures for today’s oncologists.

Now, tomorrow isn’t just something we are able to take for granted. We can’t go to sleep with out wondering if we’ve taken all of our medications, or wake up without the fear that we’ve missed an appointment. We are scheduling in chemo and radiation sessions with our college classes or trying to work them into our lives as new professionals. We are living in a new world. I’m not exactly sure why it took being diagnosed with cancer for me to realize that, but now I know. This isn’t a “go out and change the world” book. There is no “secret.” There is no Nintendo cheat sequence to beat it. There is just someone who has done this and has something to pass on to the next survivor.

What is it like to be diagnosed with cancer as a twenty-something?

If you’re reading this book, I’m pretty sure that you have an idea. As I said earlier, I was relieved when I was diagnosed. I was just glad that someone was able to figure out what was wrong with me and that I wasn’t actually in need of my “crazy meds.” There was, however, a difference between initially being diagnosed and actually letting that fact sink in to the brain and the soul.
•The brain thinks: I should have gotten a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. The odds were better.
•The soul asks: Why me? What did I do to deserve this?

It’s true. Charlie had a better chance of finding the golden ticket than we did of getting cancer. The vast majority of cancers that we’re getting are not described as genetic or environmental. (Personally, I think it’s got to be one or the other. Eventually, science will be able to tell.) Our counterparts who are smokers and heavy drinkers aren’t getting lung and liver cancer in their 20s—they’ll have to wait a few more decades for that to kick in. For the most part we have been diagnosed with diseases that are being categorized as phenomena. That leads us to the questioning. Though everyone deals differently with coming to grips with cancer, I’ve found that understanding the hand that’s been dealt is roughly parallel to those seven, well-known stages of grief.

Shock. A lot of people experience the feeling of numbness—both physically and emotionally. Others feel like they’ve been punched in the gut. Some people feel a mixture of both. I had two very real physical reactions of shock. First, I fainted while having blood drawn. I have fainted twice in my entire life, and both times have been due to my illness. Secondly, I had a panic attack. For me, the proverbial duck with the water streaming down her back, this was not common. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I thought, “great, let’s add a heart attack to the cancer.” But it wasn’t a heart attack. The more I tried to ease the pain, the more wide-spread it became. If you haven’t dealt with your shock, or if you are in the middle of it, work with your healthcare team. They have resources, both psychological and medicinal that can help you.

Denial. If you didn’t have many or even any symptoms, this might hit harder for you than someone like me. There’s: It’s not true. Someone mixed up test results. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. If you’ve already had a second opinion, it probably is true, but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. As you’re going through these stages, your family members most likely will be as well. I’ll touch later on the importance of boundaries. One boundary I had with my mother, in particular, was no wishful thinking. Ever the optimist, she’d throw things out in our early conversations about my diagnosis that had me hoping against hope that things would turn out one way. When they didn’t, I was crushed. A lot of this was her going through her own denial phase.

Bargaining. This isn’t like bargaining with the ladies selling t-shirts on a Caribbean island on spring break. This is more, God if you could only make go away, I’ll call my parents more often. Or I’ll stop eating my roommate’s food when they aren’t around and blaming it on mice. Or I’ll Reduce, Reuse, Recycle more. You’re willing to give up just about anything to make this all a bad dream. Even those who don’t necessarily believe in a higher power try to make deals. It’s all part of the process. It’s normal.

Guilt. This one is different than grieving for a lost loved one. Our guilt can be for things that we did or didn’t do. We partied too hard, drank too much, or didn’t sleep enough. It can also be guilt for the perceived burden we will be placing on our loved ones or employers. The best thing that we can do is actually believe that this isn’t our fault. It’s no one’s fault.

Anger. Oh yeah, as soon as we stop blaming ourselves we blame everyone and thing around us. Loudly, and usually in a very high-pitched voice. We blame God, the world for what it has come to, our doctors for not being able to figure all of this out sooner. You name it, we blame it. This is also a fabulous off-shoot of the millennial generation and our feelings of entitlement. Because of that we feel that we should have had better healthcare to prevent this from happening. Get mad, throw things, (soft, not breakable things) just get it out. Don’t hold onto your anger, because if you do you’ll miss out on the last two phases and no one will want to play with you anymore.

Depression. Sleep all you want. Cry all you want. Do what ever you feel like doing as long as it’s safe. Again, work with your healthcare team through this. They are professionals that are part of a network focused on keeping you healthy and alive. If you find yourself having thoughts of suicide or of hurting yourself, get help. If you don’t have someone to talk to when you need it, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1.800.SUICIDE or 1.800.442.HOPE.

Acceptance. Finally. Maybe it took you two days to get here, maybe it will take two months. The point is to get here! When you can accept that you have been diagnosed with cancer, then you can start dealing with it effectively and you can begin to regain some sense of normalcy. In the end, your diagnosis of cancer is not the end. You have a battle to prepare for, and hopefully win. In this stage and beyond you will be a better loved one, a better patient and overall a better you.

What is it like to have cancer as a twenty-something?

Two words: Speed bump. Ninety-nine times out of 100 you are going to get through this. You can never say this to yourself enough: It’s not the end of the world. Practice it. It might, however, be the end of your world as you know it, but when all is said and done your new world will have a lot more to chalk up to experience. How many people do you know at your age who have gone through cancer? Sure it’s becoming more common for people our age, but guess what? You’re special (as if you weren’t already!). Congratulations! People may treat you differently. So what? You’re still you. Eventually, those people will see that.

Don’t be surprised if occasionally you forget that you have cancer. The first time that this happened to me was about five weeks into chemotherapy. I was two weeks after my second session and I was feeling really good. I was starting back to work and I think between the adrenaline of the new semester beginning and just feeling healthy, I forgot what was going on. A fellow staff member at the College came up and asked how I was feeling. I replied fine, as per usual. Then she asked about my treatment and it hit me what she meant. I honestly had forgotten that I was sick. Now, this is not a bad thing, don’t get the wrong idea. This can sometimes play into overdoing things. Feeling like you can do things exactly like you did before treatment. Though some people find that they have a good deal of strength and stamina during treatments, I wouldn’t suggest (nor any physician that I know,) running a marathon. Working full time through treatment isn’t a viable option for most. If you feel like you have to work or take classes full time, then there is a great possibility that between that, eating, treatments and sleeping there isn’t much energy left to do much else. It might not feel like your life, but it is. Embrace it.

One of the main reasons that I chose to take on this project was that after I was initially diagnosed I tried to find anything to read to help me understand what was going to happen to me. My physicians gave me magazines and pamphlets galore. Every one of them was informative on the cancer front, but I still felt like there was something missing in my cancer puzzle. The pictures of the people (models) with cancer were all at least parent-aged or older. I’m twenty-six. I know I sometimes feel like a stranger in my own skin on a normal basis. Cancer just magnified that. I felt like I still had baby teeth compared to the images that I was seeing. Granted, we are still the large minority of cancer patients/survivors, but come on. Show me at least one twenty-something in your materials, cancer publishers. (Note: Wig catalogs are a different story; I don’t count them in this).