Don’t let anything stop you from taking the plunge. Here is one woman’s gutsy approach to living in spite of her disease.
Text by Jennifer Goodman Linn
I’ve always been a “seize the day” type of person, but everything I really know about fearless living began on December 21, 2004. Although New York City was buzzing with preholiday preparations, I was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at a radiology office, emerging from a CAT scan machine where I’d been wedged uncomfortably.
The radiologist looked like he could use a vacation; he was unshaven and had large, puffy bags under his eyes. His tone was compassionate but had an all-in-a-day’s-work edge as he said, “Are you aware that you have a tumor roughly the size of a football in your abdomen?”
No, I wasn’t aware — I was the opposite of aware. Tumor? Who has a tumor? I thought. The doctor couldn’t possibly be talking to me.
This would be the first of many out-of-body moments to come. Ten days later, while most people were toasting New Year’s Eve with champagne and dancing, I was shuffling around Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on an IV drip after a grueling five-hour abdominal surgery.
The diagnosis was MFH sarcoma, a rare cancer of the connective tissue, which affects only about 1,500 people a year in the U.S. The doctors said my odds of beating it were 50-50, and we had no clear blueprint for how to proceed. There was little available information about the disease, and treatment consisted of some antiquated chemotherapy cocktails. We’d all be working without a net.
But this story isn’t about my disease. It’s about how I’ve chosen to live my life in spite of the disease.
I Still Had a Choice
If I told you fearlessness was my go-to response after the diagnosis, I’d be lying. During the first few weeks, I wasn’t exactly saying, “Cancer? Bring it on!” I felt it all: terror, shock, uncertainty, helplessness. I was 33 years old, I had just gotten married, I had a career I loved, and there was so much more I wanted to do.
My mind raced through a montage of those dramatic cancer moments in movies — think “Beaches” and “Terms of Endearment.” I actually found myself asking the cliched questions: “Why me?” “How long do I have?”
And then, in a moment of clarity that I still don’t completely understand, I realized that fear would eat me up if I let it — and I couldn’t afford to let it. Cancer hadn’t taken away all my options. I still had a choice about how I was going to live my life from day to day. I could give up, or I could fight like hell. That’s when I made a vow to myself: to live fearlessly.
