For Jill, coming to terms with cancer was a lot like going through mourning. It happened in a matter of stages.
Jill's Story
"My life ground to a halt."
I went to the doctor a couple of times for pain in my eye, and he said it was nothing. But, something wasn't right and I kept going back. Finally, the doctor found a big tumor in the back of my eye. It turned out I had this rare cancer, called ocular melanoma. Initially, it felt very traumatic because it's not the kind of cancer you take care of once. It's sort of always there and you run the risk of it hiding in your organs and one day suddenly popping up. They told me I would most likely lose the vision in my eye.
At the time, I had two children, who were 7 and 10, and I was in the second year of my doctorate program in child psychology. I realized I needed to slow everything down and take stock. I needed to go through treatment and stick close to home. I was very concerned about my children and trying to keep things normal.
It was very overwhelming at times, but by breaking it down, and just sort of thinking about getting through this day, or finishing this course, or getting through this set of scans, or this set of treatments, I was able to deal with it. I had to tell myself: I don't have to get to the end so I can say I have had a successful life, I just need to get through this day.
"I found inner resources I didn't know I had."
People told me the best thing to do is go to a support group and I am sure they are tremendously helpful, but I didn't go there. I'm from Boston, and we have that kind of Yankee sensibility of, well, you get out of bed, and you get dressed, and you put on your lipstick and you keep going.
A friend in my [doctorate] program suggested we do this AIDS ride from New York to Boston. Well, I'd never done anything like that and I thought: "Me? Ride a bike from New York to Boston? That is nuts!" Obviously, my first response was to say no, but she insisted we just train -- just train one day and if we didn't like it, we wouldn't have to do it. Every day, she'd say, okay, we're just going to train tomorrow. The next thing I knew, it was time to go on the ride. By that point I had to go on the ride because we had raised a lot of money. People had faith me in, and I think they gave me bigger checks because they were rooting for me. And I'm glad because the ride was really, really great. In retrospect, I realize I was out to beat this thing, beat this cancer.
"Sometimes, all I can do is laugh."
I come from a very funny family. Our way of dealing with this was to try and find the humor in it. I've received a number of eye presents [since the diagnosis]. The best one was the keychain my sister gave me for Christmas -- a keychain with an eyeball on it. I have fender benders all over the car, because I have no depth perception. I actually crashed into our house once, and put a big hole in the house, and a big hole in the car. And my husband just said, "Well, I guess we won't be buying new cars any more."
Knock on wood...
Physically things are great. I haven't had any recurrence, and I rarely think about the cancer any more. In fact, when I do have down times it's almost a positive thing because I need only to be reminded how fragile things are. This inspires me. This is what gets me out of bed. This is what keeps me going.
