I know you have been wondering how in the heck I got to be me. It has been implied that there are a large amount of background stories contributing to this evolution of mine. Welp, you are about to hear some of them!
That’s right folks. My autobiography is about to launch into publication. I even wrote enough to achieve a hardcover edition! My publishers tell me that they have already nominated it for a national book honor for best biography. I am so humbled and flattered by this that I about burst into tears when I heard it.
I hope you all get a chance to read it when it comes out. I want to be very clear about a couple of things. This is not meant to be a tattle tale tell-all. This is meant to be a peak into some of the stories and adventures I have been through and that have helped shape me into who I am. The main point of writing the book in the first place was to try to finish processing some of those memories and hopefully show everyone how it is possible to make the choice to end up a good human regardless of what happens to you.
There are ways to extract good out of many different circumstances. I am not talking about being a doormat or kidding yourself and not trying to get out of a bad situation. I am not talking about not advocating for yourself. There are amazing nuggets and moments and some not so amazing moments as well. I hope you all enjoy, learn, and hopefully be empowered by it. Happy Reading!
I hear this cheerful sentence from the vet and doctor’s offices all the time. They say it with a smile as if you are supposed to find it amazing and reassuring if you do not hear from them. You are supposed to rejoice at the lack of bad news, or any news whatsoever.
You know what I hear when they say that? I don’t need to take the time to reach out to you personally to let you know that you are ok. I have just saved myself a ton of time in my busy day. Nothing about this statement lets me know that they are actually concerned about me or my pet, or that I can actually be sure that they didn’t miss something and forgot to call? That could happen too ya know. How long do I wait before I know it really is no news is good news? Are we sure after a week, two weeks, a month? See where I am going with this?
You see, at my office we call, or if we can’t get through, we text or leave a message about every darn thing, good, bad, ugly, sideways, or fantastic. That way we almost eliminate the chance of missing anything and the patient or customer has no question in their minds that they are worth our time and investment in their care. So, what if the majority of the calls are just to say that something is normal. Awesome! Then you are also making sure that you are giving yourself little to no chance of missing the few abnormal or bad news ones. To me it’s a no brainer. Inform everyone about everything. You tend to miss less this way and it shows that you give a crap. Ok diatribe over for now. Have a great day everybody.
Man oh man it has been quite the two years. I imagine that is a tagline that applies to millions at this point. It’s not that I am considering myself anything special but my gosh, just how much of a shit show are we all supposed to endure? Is there no end? What is the purpose? Are we being punished? I don’t understand.
Let me break it down for you. In the last two years, there has been an ongoing pandemic, businesses have been shut down, people have died, my daughters have had some major issues, I got cancer, and now my husband is having open heart surgery. I am not in a competition with anyone or anything but sheesh, it feels like a lot. I am not a person to complain per se but after awhile, even I am not immune to the occasional breakdown and thoughts of why me and why us? I start asking stupid questions like Does the universe hate me? Is this some kind of karmic retribution? Why can’t I make sense of this?
Then, I stop a minute, take a breath and try to calm myself. I realize that I am asking the wrong questions. All I am doing is making myself crazy trying to find an explanation or blame. This only leads to frustration, confusion, and anger. It won’t get me anywhere. At some point, I need to let it go and concentrate on moving forward and learning from what has happened. Otherwise, more bad things are bound to happen if I get stuck in a vicious cycle of negativity. That negativity will do nothing but drive more bad decisions and lead to further bad outcomes. I am not saying that we are not allowed to be human. We are allowed to feel sorry for ourselves and have boohoo moments. We just can’t let the boohoo moments define us.
Today’s the day. Today I go for excisional biopsy of the lymph nodes around my neck so they can study it and determine if I have ” the good kind” of lymphoma, Hodgkins, or the aggressive kind, diffuse large B Cell Non-Hodgkins. Good kind? Bad kind? I am just not sure what to root for here. Isn’t all cancer “the bad kind?” My doctor also told me with a smile that he has never lost a patient with Hodgkins. Awesome! But wait! What about Non-Hodgkins patients? He meant to be reassuring. Instead of taking that as good news, I immediately panicked that he had somehow over bragged to the universe and karmic retribution had to be on it’s way.
Sorry, I couldn’t help a bit of sarcasm there. I know what the doctors mean. One kind has really high cure rates and one not so high and tougher to get through. Yes. Of course I understand. However, it is tough for a patient to embrace the clinical perspective right after hearing a diagnosis. Sometimes they just need a minute to try to start processing before they are able to realize whether they are actually “luckier ” than they thought or not. The moment you hear the words “we think you have cancer”, everything kind of stops. No other words have a chance to register. That dirty C word just hammers in your ears like an obnoxious bell and your mind starts racing. You need to just let it sit a minute before you start comparing stats and trying to tell them how to think about it. I know this first hand. I do it too as a doctor. I am always trying to temper my need to tell a patient that it’s not so bad and flood them with good statistics to reassure them with their need to just sit a second and take in what I said first.
Bad news is never easy to deliver, even when a patient is expecting it. I don’t really think that there is one best way to do it. I tend to vary my presentation depending on my knowledge of the patient and what I think they can handle. I was expecting this news, based on everything that I knew, but I still wasn’t instantly ready to prioritize and tier the possible types of cancer and how one was better than the other. I just needed to take in the fact that I could have cancer. That was as far as my mind could go at the moment. For me as a physician, if I know that I have to deliver bad news, I deliver the news and then I am quiet for a minute. I deliberately try to let the patient be the first one to start the next part of the conversation. I have just told them something that may soon launch them into a life-changing scenario in which they have little control. I figure that the least thing I can do is let them have control over how the conversation goes in the next few minutes. If I let them speak first before bombarding them with statistics or trying to mold how they should perceive the news, I can more clearly gauge how to tell them more and what to tell them. I think that it is really important to let them at least take control of this initial conversation. It may be the only decision that they get to concretely make for awhile. Sometimes I can’t reassure them right away. Sometimes they just aren’t ready. They are scared, angry, and confused. Sometimes you have to let them be for a minute.
I think it is tougher for my doctors to let me be for a minute. They know that I am a physician too and they figure that I can handle all the stats and details. They care almost too much because they know me. They know that I can understand the information. They know that I am interested in being my own advocate. I get all that, but sometimes it is a little too much. This time, I am the patient. I am not in charge, although I am trying to act like I am. I am putting on a brave, calm, collected face. Sometimes I think I am doing that more for others than for myself. I don’t feel very calm and collected when I am sitting in my bathtub, overreading about lymphoma and trying to give myself an anxiety attack…lol. I want to be Wonder Woman, but right now, I am just me, Laura Katz, the patient. I am waiting for news just like everybody else. I am waiting to see how my life is going to change. That will have to be good enough.
I just heard about the unexpected death of an amazing human today and it really got my wheels spinning. It made me take a step back and re-evaluate my own processing of the world around me lately and really embrace the amount of time that I have wasted with misdirected anger, emotions and the occasional dose of self-pity. I need to stop. It shouldn’t take news like this to shake me out of my own festival of wallowing. I should already know that, whatever potentially exaggerated feelings that I have about what my own life struggles, there is always something worse out there that someone else is going through. I am not saying that I spend an exorbitant amount of time feeling sorry for myself or anything, but really any time is too much time now that I think about it. Have I had some shitty things going on lately? Check. Have I had financial issues like everyone else? Have I had any health issues? Check. But, for all that, I have plenty of things to be grateful for too. I still have a job. I am still above ground. I have great kids and a great husband. I work hard and I get to see the positive effects on patients, etc etc. Like I have said many times over, I need to follow my own advice and break the proverbial chains that tie me to negativity like some sort of prisoner. All they do is hold me back and keep me from recognizing anything good when it happens. So, I am going to make myself a promise and grab those bolt cutters with both hands and make way for positivity. Who’s with me?
Have you ever noticed that when an experience ends in a sour note, our first instinct is to try to erase it’s memory as if it never existed in the first place? We attempt to block any recollection of the event as if to protect ourselves from the pain. Sometimes we go as far as to rewrite history to attempt to make ourselves feel better about the whole thing or to justify our decision in the end. I think that we do this in order to regain control and shield ourselves from the bad experience, thus taking away it’s power and impact. This is what we tell ourselves at least. However, I feel like the exact opposite is true. Every experience, good or bad, has value and a take away point. Most experiences that end badly were not truly 100% bad, or we wouldn’t have engaged with that experience to begin with. Nobody is that masochistic. I think that by expending the mental energy to rewrite history or deny any good memories that were also associated with it, we are actually granting more power to the bad part of the experience than it deserves. We are actually chaining ourselves to that negativity and becoming an essential part of the bad experience. We are discounting our own credibility in our judgement regarding what we chose to participate in. By allowing ourselves to acknowledge any positive aspects as well, we truly begin to free ourselves from that negativity and realize that, whatever the experience was, it wasn’t just a waste of our time to begin with. Have a fantastic day everybody!
