Survival Mode

Almost four years ago, I started dreading this call, and tried imagining my reactions and emotions upon receiving it. I would lie awake in my bed at night, oscillating between allowing the tears to flow freely, to resolving to be strong and think positively. But the last time I really remember actively worrying about it was roughly two years ago. It’s strange how time numbs us when everything is just going fine. We all too easily forget both good and bad things that we have experienced.

So when the call came, I was caught off guard. I didn’t react like I imagined I would – maybe I was in shock, maybe I was in denial. My mom told me my dad’s stage 4 stomach cancer came back, and that it had spread near his kidney and possibly his lungs. Even though I knew there was a high probability that this would happen, I guess I just figured that if he reached 5 years since his initial diagnosis in June 2006, he’d be pretty much in the clear. I think I stopped worrying because this June is his 4 year mark - he was more than halfway there, and our family had defined our own sense of normalcy since his surgery, multiple rounds of chemo, and radiation in 2006 and 2007. It was naive of me to think the possibility of recurrence was diminishing the closer we got to the 5 year mark.

Maybe I forced myself to think this way; my own mind’s way of protecting my emotions. I like to call it survival mode. I did it when my mom was in the hospital for a month going through grueling physical, occupational, and speech therapy to recover as much functionality as she could from a freak-mistake during her open heart surgery which caused her to have a stroke in 2007. (That also happened to be precisely the time my dad was recovering from radiation, and getting ready for more chemo.)

Everyone said I was strong. Rather, I think maybe I was too weak to handle it all at once, so my body switched to this survival mode, where I just focused on the day-to-day details like going from one therapy appointment to the next, because otherwise it would just be completely overwhelming. It was only much later, many months before my survival-mode-guard came down, before I realized how taxing that period was –I would burst out in tears seemingly randomly, to Kyun’s utter confusion, and I would have to explain that I was reminded of the time in the hospital because a song that I just heard was one that my mom and I listened to every morning while eating our hospital breakfasts.

I’ve decided not to be so bottled up and “strong” this time. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being transparent and vulnerable, scared, sad, and afraid of the future. That’s reality, and there’s no need to hide that part. I’m an engineer, and I’m my dad’s daughter – put those two together and you have someone awful with expressing herself in words in person. Maybe writing it down is a way to tell my parents how much I love and care about them, and along the way, telling other people how awesome my parents are.