From: "Dr. D. Kossove" <doctordee@telkomsa.net>
To: "sharon anderson"; "lmS List"
Subject: mottoes, and driving one's self crazy
Date: Saturday, January 17, 2004 11:55 PM

>>Finding my Motto:
I enjoyed the List postings about what people tell themselves to cope.
Marcia  are you keeping a list of these?
I am on a quest for my motto!<<

My first year was spent in such fear!  It got a lot better near the end, after I had been seeing my hypnotherapist-psychologist for several months.  
I was under such tension....  the pain in my shoulders and stomach was actually what drove me to therapy.   It was 10/10.  

My mottoes did not hit me like a lightning blaze.  I had heard them, but it was only as time went on, that they started having therapeutic meaning and effect for me.

The two that I use personally are
1. Whatever happens, I will find the strength to deal with it.
2. This LMS may very well kill me, but not today.


Both are useful in dealing with the uncertainty.   As I have said before, I think I have a considerable amount of physical and emotional courage.   I have been held by my feet and dangled head down in an attempt to reach a patient who was trapped...   I have fought off pickpockets and would-be rapists or molesters...  and I have had the usual happenstances of emotional traumas  and managed to handle them.  

But LMS was something different.    I was one of the few on this list who was aware that I was dying before the diagnosis was made.   I just thought it was cardiomyopathy from the chronic relapsing mononucleosis.  I had accepted my death from this untreatable cause six weeks before I even saw my doctor.    What a surprise it was that 16th of January 3 years ago when I saw the Chest Xray with that ugly shadow in my upper left corner.

After the resection, it was the uncertainty of when the return would occur, or if it would occur, and what would happen then,  that created the fear, anxiety, tension.  

These two mottoes helped me put my coping methods into words.
I don't think that it is the motto that necessarily teaches one how to cope, the process might be rather figuring out how to cope, and then using the motto to remind onesself.

This was the first one that developed: " Whatever happens, I will find the strength to deal with it."   My psychologist used it during hypnosis, and it made sense.   In learning about LMS, I got the knowledge to know what to do, and in being on the list I collected a few hardy souls and asked them to be there for me if / when the LMS returned.    As it turned out, I did not need their help except psychologically...     But in finding out about LMS and the different things I could do if it recurred, I also found emotional strength in the knowledge.  And then I realized that no matter why, even dying, I would manage emotionally.   Once that happened, the motto meant something.  And became MINE.


The second one...  This LMS may very well kill me, but not today... I read in an article about denial.  When I first read it, I thought it was funny, and laughed.  But when I got sicker, then I would lie in bed and think about death and dying and just tie myself up in knots.   However, being a rather practical person, at some point I just got disgusted with this, and decided that here i was spending my last months thinking about dying, instead of living.   And gave up this obsessing, so I could do things from day to day.  For at least one day at a time.   I found this phrase very comforting.   But only AFTER I found a coping method that it describes.

However, perhaps hearing these phrases helped me develop the coping methods subconsciously?

I do know that some "mottoes" don't help at all, and some just make me angry.  "Thoughts and dreams where cancer cannot go"  simply doesn't do it for me.  But evidently was important to Orland Heatherington, a founder of this list.

I also know, like others on this list, that 9-11 crystallized something within me, and changed me and my reaction to the diagnosis.  It took me out of myself, and changed the perspective, and I was never the same afterwards.  I felt incredibly lucky to be alive, and unworthy of it at the same time.

hope this helps,
with love,
doreen
Together we are more, and more effective, than we are separately.

All correspondence is my personal opinion.  I am not an oncologist.  I am not practicing medicine online.  Provision of information is for investigation and discussion with your doctors. 