Life after cancer

Readers of my blog may wonder what I am up to in my life after cancer. Well, life goes on as usual.

When I first went back to work, I felt fine. I was able to keep my cool and maintain a fairly good balance between work and rest. As time goes by, I find myself increasingly drawn to more and more work, and needing to stay up later and later into the night. This is not a good sign. I am still trying to find a new and healthy balance.

One important impact of cancer on my life is that I have started to exercise regularly. No, not exercising three times a week for half an hour each time, but hiking weekly. Above the village behind the housing estate where I live, there is a path that, after a 45-minute walk up and down the hill, converges with the MacLehose Trail, a country-park hiking trail. Every Saturday or Sunday, I make an effort to hike this path. Sometimes, when I don’t feel like going, I tell myself that it is a medicine that I must take, given the Hong Kong-based evidence that shows a positive association between exercise (or lack of it) and occurrence of breast cancer. Sometimes, when I miss my weekend hike, I try to make it up in the middle of the following week.

Those who hike will know that it is not easy to find a hiking partner. Everyone walks at a different tempo, some fast, some slow and some in-between. So I usually hike by myself. Hiking on my home trail—I call it my home trail now—has opened my eyes to the world of nature. I have seen how a snail flips its body trying to shake a bug from its shell. I have seen wild pigs running down the hill, snakes slither across a path and into the grass again, and sometimes, more alarmingly, wild dogs. I always take a hiking stick with me, not for hiking, but to frighten away menacing dogs. I have become much more aware that I am close to nature, observing different flowers that blossom at different times of the year, or fruit trees that I never noticed before. Hong Kong has 7 million people, and it is hard to find a spot where you don’t run into anyone. But, sometimes, I do not run into anyone up on the hill, and it is as if I have all that nature to myself. Such beauty and tranquility!

Occasionally, when I am alone, I ask myself what cancer means to me. There is also a slight fear that I may have forgotten something important about surviving cancer. Sometimes I feel I don’t know what the important lesson was, while, at other times, I believe the key lesson is that I should remember that a good life is about loving and forgiving. Essentially, life goes on as usual after cancer. And that is already very comforting.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.