Who Cares About Apathy?

As is oft said, cancer changes your life.  It can be unpredictable and demanding.  What I've found is that it's controlling my life in some pretty mundane ways.

It not only takes your health, it takes your time.  I can't say for other forms of this disease, but with MCC there's always a sense of urgency.  Everything is subservient to your treatment, or preparation for treatment.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found out I had MCC, and two days later, I had an appointment with a surgeon.  A week and a half later, I had neck surgery.   After a short breather,  I had two doctor appointments in one day which set me up for the triathlon of cancer treatment: four doctor appointments, each with a separate doctor and two different scans, all in one week.  I figure the only reason I haven't had an EKG is that I've proved already that my heart can handle stress.

To be fair, some of the doctor appointments were scheduled before all this MCC business started, but I still had to account for them and weave them into my job and free time.  No wonder I'm always tired; I'm scared to imagine what I'd feel like if I were actually sick!

A cancer triathlon is not like an ordinary triathlon -- triathlons generally have a set route that doesn't change and you get a chance to see what the whole route looks like before you start.  Again, this is only my observation, but the cancer triathlon is like a regular triathlon route littered with signs, each one telling you which sign you have to run to next, with the added wrinkle that the officials are continually moving the signs around, and sometimes stopping you in between signs to tell you new directions!  This uncertainty can be quite vexing.

So... we have serious disease with an uncertain prognosis, it puts you into a grueling race that runs hither, thither and yon, and you have very little control over where it's going to take you if you want to finish the race in one piece.  What's a body to do?

The only thing I can recommend is Apathy.  I'd been nursing and tweaking this philosophy for a couple of years before MCC, but now I've had a chance to give it a good hard workin' and it seems to be bearing up.  I call it Apathy, but it also goes by other names like The Serenity Prayer, Healthy Denial, Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, One Day At A Time, Don't Borrow Trouble, and Matthew 6:27.

Apathy lets you decide what's important and what's not.  You get to choose what to worry about, and let the rest slide.  You get to decide exactly how much stress you want to take on and when.  Yes, you are important, but you've got a serious disease to deal with right now, so let the others take care of everything else so you can concentrate on getting yourself better.