Is It Normal to Be Scared of Cancer?
|
|
Time to read 30 min
From one survivor to another. Yes.
That is the short answer, and I want it to be the first line on this page because I remember looking for it and not finding it anywhere.
The longer answer is that the fear you are feeling is not a failure of coping, and it is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is the appropriate human response to cancer. A woman who has just been told she has cancer and who feels fine about it is not someone who has mastered the situation. She is someone who has not yet absorbed what she has been told. The fear is how a person who is paying attention reacts to the facts. You are paying attention. You are reacting correctly.
I am a survivor, and I am writing this for the woman who is in the week or the month before her first treatment, or the hour of the night when her mind will not stop. The doctors who are managing your care cannot answer this question the way it needs to be answered. They can tell you that fear is common. They cannot tell you what the fear actually feels like, or what it does to you, or how to hold it while the days stretch on between appointments.
Some of what was true for me will be true for you; some will not. But I think the shape of it — the way fear moves through a woman who has just been asked to do this — is shared enough that my experience will be useful to yours.
The First Fear Is One You Do Not Know You Have
There are two kinds of fear in the body. There is the fear you are aware of — the fear that has words, that you could describe to someone if you wanted to. And there is a fear that sits deeper than that. A fear your body is holding before your mind has agreed there is anything to be afraid of.
During cancer diagnosis and treatment, both are there, all the time. The nature of them evolves, and it can be hard to describe.
The second kind kicks in the second you feel an urgent need to schedule something that is not routine — the reality that you are actually checking for cancer. This could be real. Before you have a diagnosis. Before you have a name for anything. Before you even know to call it fear. It is the first hmmm, I don't like this, and it is very deep inside. It does not use words. It just insists, quietly, that something is not right.
A lot of your brain is actively telling you to push that fear down and not acknowledge it. You have no time to sit and mope. Action is needed. You have to schedule the appointment, find the referral, get the paperwork, keep your life running while you are also suddenly trying to solve a medical problem that was not on your calendar a week ago.
So the fear stays underneath. It is there. You are feeling it. But you are not, yet, allowed to know that you are feeling it.
But the fear can be too much for the body to hold. It needs to come out. So you find yourself sobbing in your car at a red light, or crying uncontrollably during a movie. Your body is releasing it when it boils over.
Grace Under Pressure
One of the longest-held social expectations of women is grace under pressure. We see it in every queen that is beside her king during an invasion. The high chin. The I'm fine. The strength she holds when others feel fear.
You may find yourself placating other people's fear before being willing to even acknowledge your own. Your partner is scared, and you are reassuring him. Your mother is scared, and you are calming her down. Your children sense that something is happening, and you are being careful not to frighten them. Your colleagues ask how you are doing, and you say you are fine, you are handling it, you have a plan. You tell yourself: focus on getting appointments. It could be nothing. Do not overreact until you know more.
Again. Pushing it down.
And then something goes wrong. You cannot find your insurance card. Or you call to schedule the scan you were told to get, and the first available slot is eight weeks out. Or your doctor's office does not call you back when they said they would, and you are waiting by your phone for three days, staring at it when it finally rings because the number is not the one you were waiting for.
These small triggers have the potential to send you into a dizzy spiral of fear and emotion that you feel yourself at the precipice of a whirlpool, grasping for any reason not to succumb to its pull. The fear you did not know you had is trying to come through, and the small logistical friction of a lost insurance card or an unavailable appointment is the first surface it can actually reach. It has no words for what it is afraid of, so it spends its force on whatever is available.
I think survival instinct tells you to push it down. Swim hard away from the whirlpool. I am drowning. Just keep swimming. Act.
For a while, it works.
When It Broke for Me
For me, the moment the suppression stopped working was a phone call about a mammogram.
I had been told to schedule an initial diagnostic mammogram. I called the first place to make the appointment. They told me the next available slot was eight weeks out.
Eight weeks.
Eight weeks of letting cancer grow inside me while waiting for an initial diagnostic. Eight weeks of not knowing. Eight weeks of the suppressing mind having to do its job continuously, without a break, while my body held a fear I was not allowed to feel.
I lost it. Absolutely lost it. The whirlpool won. The fear that I had been pushing underneath came all the way up, and for however long it was — I do not remember exactly — I was not a woman maintaining grace under pressure. I was a woman who had been carrying something that was too heavy to carry, and I finally set it down, and what happened next was that I understood how heavy it had been.
And then — and I want to be careful how I tell this part, because it is the part that matters most — I got up off the floor and I called every hospital, every imaging center, every place that did scans within driving distance. I called until I found one with an opening the next day. Out of sheer relentless effort and amazing luck, I found a space. The next day, I was in a gown, lying on a table, getting the diagnostic I had been told I would have to wait eight weeks for.
The fear was real. The motivation it created was real too.
If I could tell you only one thing from the entire rest of this post, it would be this. The fear is not a problem to manage. It is not a thing you have to wrestle into submission before you can function. Sometimes the fear is the engine. Sometimes falling apart is what buys you the clarity and the urgency to do the thing that had felt impossible an hour earlier. You are not supposed to be cool about this. No one is supposed to be cool about this.
Once You Are in the System
Once you have a diagnosis, once you are in a system, once you have been handed off to a team that is working on you, the nature of the fear changes.
Initially the fear is: am I Stage IV? Is this terminal cancer? That is the first question, and it is the one that lives in your throat for the hours or days or weeks between diagnosis and staging. You do not know yet whether what you have is something that will be treated with intent to cure or something that will be managed for however long you have. That distinction is enormous, and you cannot know which one you are dealing with until the imaging and pathology come back.
From there, the fear swirl pivots quickly to the loved ones you will leave behind. Almost the moment the mortality question shows up, it bounces off you and lands on the people who love you. If you have small children, they are the visual embodiment of your reason to live. You do not think about your own death abstractly. You think about your daughter asking someone else who is not you to braid her hair. You think about your son looking for you at a future event and not finding you. You think about your husband learning to sleep alone. You think about the specific holes you would leave.
I want to tell you that this pivot feels noble, or loving, or protective. In some ways it is those things. But some of it is also another way the fear is finding its way through. You are still the person who is sick, and the fear about you is real even if you are routing it through the people you love. Both things are true.
The Paralysis of the Waiting
Depending on the diagnosis, the waiting for the staging or the intent-to-cure decision is very scary. It is ripe with fear. And it tends to be a moment of paralysis, even as you are scheduling scans and waiting for results, because there is nothing to do while you wait. You are between the part where you can take action and the part where you will know what you are acting on. You are not sick enough yet to be actively being treated, and you are not yet free of the question of whether the worst version is true.
In every scan, you are using every iota of human face reading skills to try to surmise the outcome. The technicians are very good at giving nothing away. They have trained themselves to be neutral. They are not allowed to tell you what they are seeing, even if they can see something. And you are studying their faces anyway, looking for the small tell — the moment their expression changes, the pause before they speak, the slight alteration in their voice — that might tell you what they are not saying.
You will find tells that are not there. Your brain, in that state, is not a reliable interpreter of faces. The technician's slight frown is probably about the angle of the imaging, not about what she is finding. The pause before she speaks is probably because she is reading a screen, not because the screen has just told her something terrible. You will not know this until after. In the moment, every micro-expression is freighted with meaning.
It is not just faces. Your brain will find omens wherever it looks. I remember driving to the hospital for my follow-up with the oncologist to get scan results, and it was raining, and I found myself assuming the results would be bad because of the rain. I caught myself doing it. I had to use my rational brain to argue my emotional brain out of that assumption. I am a very educated person. It did not matter. The fear of what I was about to hear was big enough that my mind was looking for any data, any pattern, any sign — and the weather was what was available. If you catch yourself doing something similar, you are not losing your grip. You are a person whose mind is trying to predict a result it cannot predict, and it is reaching for whatever signal it can find.
This period will end. The results will come. They will tell you something — either the worst version, or not the worst version, or something in between that is the real version. Whatever they say, the paralysis of not knowing will be replaced by the different problem of knowing. Both are hard in different ways, and I am not going to pretend knowing is easier. It is not always easier. But it is different, and it is usually the next thing that you can act on.
The Whale in the Depths
Once you have a plan, once you have a diagnosis, once you know what you are dealing with — the fear stays. It does not leave. It becomes more like a whale in the depths than a shark attacking you. Still dangerous, still there, but moving in a different way. You are not being actively pursued in the water. But you know what is under you.
This fear surfaces in a form that might surprise you. It does not always surface as fear. For me, it often surfaces as frustration, usually at the exact moment someone is trying to be kind.
If anyone can beat cancer, you can.
People say this to you. They mean it. They love you and they are frightened too and they are reaching for the thing they hope will help. But cancer is not a willpower contest. Beating it has almost nothing to do with being the kind of person who beats things. It has to do with your staging, your pathology, your response to treatment, the biology of the specific cells that are in you — things that are largely outside your control and that no amount of grit can override. When someone tells you if anyone can beat cancer, you can, they are implicitly saying that the women who do not beat cancer somehow did not have enough of whatever it is you have. That is not true. That has never been true. And sitting across from someone saying it to you, when you know women who fought harder than anyone and did not make it, is a specific kind of small impossible moment.
You are constantly coaching yourself back from emoting, so as not to bite the heads off of well-meaning people. They love you. They are trying. You know this. And you also know that what they are saying is trivializing something that cannot be trivialized, and you have to hold your face in place while they finish saying it.
If you are lucky, there is someone in your life who does not do this. Someone who has been through it, or been close to someone who has. They ask different questions. Want to tell me what you learned in your appointment? Not you are going to beat this. Not stay positive. Not you are so strong. They ask you what you learned. They know you just need someone to hold the burden with you. They are willing to sit with you in the water and watch the whale with you, without trying to pretend it is not there.
If you do not have that person yet, you will find her. In a Facebook group, in a support community, at an infusion center, at a school pickup line where you recognize another woman in a head wrap and you both know what you are looking at. There is a whole sisterhood of women who have been where you are, and the signal that connects us is that we do not say the trivializing things. We do not tell you to beat it. We ask what you learned. We sit with you while you figure out what it means.
What Happens Once Treatment Starts
Once treatment starts, once you are recovering from surgery and getting chemo, the whale swims deeper. Still there, still lurking, surfacing only sometimes to blow. You get used to it at this depth. You adjust to the presence of it the way you adjust to a noise you have stopped consciously hearing.
It will probably stay that way until each opportunity to learn something new. Originally, you have been scared of the infusions themselves — the image of the chair, the bag hanging above you, the whole visual vocabulary of chemotherapy. Then you go through a few cycles and you learn that the infusions are not really that bad. The side effects can be managed. The fear of the thing becomes smaller as the thing becomes known.
But what you do not realize, at the beginning, is the fear you will come to associate with every oncology appointment where you get results. Every scan. Every blood panel. Every meeting where there is potential to learn something new about what is happening inside you.
My oncologist knew this. When I was waiting to hear back on my full-body scan — the one where we were looking for Stage IV — the first thing out of her mouth when she walked into the room was only good news today. Full cure. We're working towards full cure. She said it before anything else. She said it before we sat down, before she asked how I was doing, before she opened my chart. That was 100 percent her way to help dissipate the visible fear, to make space for a real conversation. She had seen my face. She knew what I had been carrying for the week between the scan and the appointment. She led with the thing she knew I most needed to hear, because she knew that until I heard it, nothing else she said was going to land.
I think about that appointment often. Good oncologists know that the fear is in the room before the patient is in the chair, and the best ones find ways to speak to it directly. If you are lucky enough to have one of those, you will know it because your appointments will feel different from the ones you have heard other women describe. Do not take her for granted.
But even when the news is only good news, the whale is still there. Recurrence is real. It will always be real. The people who want to tell you that the cancer is gone, you can stop worrying about it now are not wrong exactly, but they are not right either. For most cancers, you are never quite done. There is always a next scan, a next appointment, a next blood test, a next five-year mark to hit. The vigilance does not end. The whale does not surface, but it does not leave.
Make the Fear Useful
So it becomes a fear you realize you are going to live with for the rest of your life.
And then, over time — not immediately, not neatly, but eventually — you realize something about fear that changes how you hold it. Fear is only useful when it makes you act. If you are going to live with it, it may as well be useful fear.
For me, this translated into a relentless effort to be the best cancer patient ever. If I was going to be scared anyway, I was going to be scared in the most productive direction available. I was going to get full effectiveness from every treatment. I was going to show up to every appointment prepared. I was going to know what was in every drug I was given, what the side effects looked like, what the data said about outcomes in women like me. I was going to educate myself on every angle of what was happening to me, because the fear was not leaving and the only thing that dented it, even a little, was action.
I translated my fear into action by cleansing my house of toxins. I optimized my diet. I read the endocrine disruption literature in the evenings. I switched products I had used for twenty years. I read ingredient labels in ways I never had before. People thought I was a little crazy. Friends gently suggested that I was overdoing it. One of my providers suggested that the research itself was causing me anxiety and that I would be better off letting it go.
They did not understand. And I want to be clear about what they did not understand, because I think the woman reading this is probably getting the same advice, and she deserves to know that what she is doing is not crazy.
Internally, I was thinking: this is the only thing I can actively do to hold myself back from the whirlpool. The fear was going to be there whether I acted or not. Action did not eliminate it. But action gave it somewhere to go. Every toxin I removed from my house, every ingredient I swapped, every evening I spent reading research — these were not a failure to accept my situation. They were the only ways I had of refusing to be pulled under by it. You do not understand, and I appreciate that, but I am going to keep acting here. Because the alternative is to sit with the fear and do nothing, and that is not a thing I am able to do.
If you are feeling the same instinct — to clean up, to research, to take control of the things you can still control — I want you to know that the instinct is correct. It is not neurotic. It is not avoidance. It is one of the few fully legitimate uses of a fear that is not going to leave you. You are using it.
You also tell yourself you are doing it for your children. To keep them away from toxins. To give them a visual image of mommy in control. Because you know your kids sense the anxiety, and you are trying desperately to keep them from falling into their own whirlpool too. If nothing else, you will keep a strong external mask so they see it. They should not have to carry what you are carrying. You will not let them.
That mask is not dishonesty. That mask is the most tender form of love available to a mother in your situation, and you are allowed to wear it, even on the days when underneath it you are falling apart. Both can be true.
The Whale From Above
As your cancer therapy starts to be finished, something shifts.
You have learned the side effects of chemo are predictable and manageable. You have proven to yourself that you can live through this. You had no choice, and you did it.
The whale is still there. But you start to look at it differently. Almost from above, through the deep ocean waters. You are not in the water with it anymore. You are on the boat. You can see it down there, moving in the dark, and you know it has not left, but you are no longer at its mercy in the way you were.
You have internalized that you are currently not dead, which means you have some life ahead of you. The real fear, now, is that you do not know how much life you have ahead of you.
And then it occurs to you.
Nobody does.
The Thing Cancer Teaches You About Mortality
To be aware of our own mortality is human. Yet most of us very happily go through life not thinking about it. We plan for and assume there is a future — hopefully an amazing one. We talk about what we will do in retirement, where we will travel, what we will plant in the garden next spring. We assume.
Cancer strips the assumption. You cannot pretend, the way the healthy can pretend, that there is definitely a future of a particular length. You cannot not-think-about-it. The data you have been given about your disease forces you to know, in a way that most people never have to know, that the future is a thing that arrives one day at a time, or does not arrive at all.
What you realize, sitting with this for long enough, is that this has always been true for everyone. Your neighbor who has never had a scary diagnosis is also not guaranteed next Tuesday. Your sister who exercises every day and eats perfectly is also one test result away from learning something that will reorder her life. The difference between you and her is not the underlying reality. The difference is that you know, and she is allowed to ignore.
And once you see this, once you really see it, something strange happens. The fear that came with knowing starts to share space with a kind of clarity that the ignoring cannot produce.
Life is not a destination. It is not really even a journey to look forward to. It is the present moment, and the people we share those moments with.
The New Fear
Once this sets in, a new fear appears. It sounds something like: I'm missing it. I'm missing life. I'm wasting my time doing the wrong things.
That is a fear your first-diagnosis self did not have. She had bigger fears. She was trying to survive long enough to have a tomorrow. Now that tomorrow has started showing up reliably, you notice how much of it you are spending on things that do not matter to you, and how little of it on the things that do.
This is a useful fear. This is one of the most useful fears a woman can have.
For me, the fear of recurrence — the one that puts my own mortality in front of me whenever I try to ignore it — has become a motivator for asking the tough questions most people never bother to ask. Am I spending my days the way I want to? Am I with the people I want to be with? Am I doing work that matters to me? Am I saying yes to the things I actually want and no to the things I am tolerating out of habit?
These are not questions the healthy are required to ask. These are the questions cancer invites you to ask, and then eventually insists that you ask, because once you have seen what mortality looks like up close, pretending you have not is not available to you anymore.
For me, the sentence that came out of this was: cancer may take my life, but it will not take today.
I say it to myself on the days when the whale is closer to the surface than usual. I say it when I catch myself wasting an afternoon on something that is not the afternoon I want to be having. I say it as a declaration that the moment is what matters, and as a reminder to come back to the moment when the fear tries to pull me out of it. It is a mantra. It is also a practical tool. It has changed how I spend time.
The Statistics Conversation
Something else starts to happen, once you are far enough out.
You realize that your likelihood of recurrence is, in some cases, lower than the likelihood of the women around you developing cancer for the first time. You have done treatment. You have had the scans. You have built a lifestyle around minimizing every risk factor you can control. Your life is being watched, medically, at a level of attention most people's lives will never receive. You have, in some ways, a clearer map of your own health than most of your friends have of theirs.
When a well-meaning friend gently asks whether you still worry about dying from cancer, you may start by trying to explain this. You pull up the statistics. You tell her your five-year risk profile actually looks better than hers, because hers is the average population risk and yours is lower because of everything you have done. You ask her whether she worries about dying from cancer, and she says no, and you want to point out that statistically she probably should be thinking about it about as much as you are.
You eventually stop doing this. It does not help. The conversation is not really about statistics. The conversation is about the discomfort people feel when they are reminded of mortality, which they have been allowed to ignore, and the impulse to put that discomfort back onto the person who raised it.
So you learn not to have the statistics conversation. You let people ask their worried question, and you answer it gently, and you let them walk away feeling that they have checked on you. You no longer require them to understand the math. That is its own kind of grace, and it is the kind that comes with practice. Let them have their blissful ignorance. Remind them to get scanned.
Fear at Arm's Length
At some point, you learn to live with your fear.
Not quite at peace. Peace is a stronger word than what I can honestly claim. But at arm's length. You know your triggers. You can identify why the emotion came up. Upcoming scans, diagnosis anniversaries, news about someone else. You notice the fear without being pulled under by it. You can acknowledge that the whale is surfacing and let it blow and let it go back down, without the whirlpool spinning up around you.
And the question you ask, each time the fear arrives, becomes the same question.
How do I use this to make my life better?
Sometimes the answer is small. Go for the walk you have been skipping. Call the friend you have been meaning to call. Do not take the day for granted. Sometimes the answer is larger. Leave the job that has been draining you. Mend the relationship that has been limping along. Start the thing you have been afraid to start.
If you have been using the fear as a tool for change consistently — not all at once, not dramatically, but steadily, over months and years — there will be a moment when you look up and realize your life is meaningfully better than the life you had before you got sick. The relationships deeper. The days more intentional. The work more aligned with what you actually care about. The yeses truer. The noes firmer.
I am not going to pretend this is the cancer's gift. Cancer is not a gift. The fear is not a blessing. But the response a woman can make to the fear, if she chooses to make it, can produce a life that is better in ways the pre-cancer version could not reach.
That is what is on the other side. Not the absence of fear. The use of it. And eventually, not even the use of it consciously — just the accumulated life that was built, one fear-tool application at a time, while you were busy surviving. And in that moment, you'll realize you are thriving.
Because thriving in life is not about the absence of crisis, it is about the ability to use it wisely.
What I Want You to Know
You do not have to be brave in the way people seem to expect. The grace-under-pressure model of how women are supposed to handle this is not the only model, and I am not convinced it is even the best one. The woman who loses it and then gets up and calls twenty hospitals is not a woman who failed at being brave. She is a woman who felt what she was feeling, and let the feeling give her its energy, and used the energy to do the next thing.
You are allowed to not be fine.
You are allowed to cry where no one can hear you, and then put on mascara and go to your appointment.
You are allowed to be scared of the things that scare you — losing your hair, losing your breast, losing your sense of yourself, losing time with the people who make your life worth the fight — without having to rank them or justify which ones matter most.
You are allowed to be angry about being asked to do this, and grateful for the medicine that is going to save your life, in the same breath, in the same afternoon, in the same phone call.
You are allowed to placate other people's fear some of the time, because sometimes that is what keeps the household running, and to refuse to placate it other times, because sometimes you need the space to feel your own.
You are allowed to read every survival statistic on the internet at two in the morning, and you are allowed to close the laptop and tell yourself you will not do that again, and you are allowed to do it again the next night.
You are allowed to be terrified of the first infusion and to walk into it anyway. You are allowed to cry in the chair. You are allowed to not cry, even if you thought you would, and to wonder whether that means anything. It does not mean anything. You cried when you needed to cry, and you did not cry when you did not need to cry, and there is no correct way to feel during your own treatment.
The fear is not the enemy. The fear is the part of you that knows exactly how much you have to lose, and how much you are willing to fight for, and how much this matters. The fear is what will drive you to call every hospital. The fear is what will make you ask the question in the appointment that the polite version of you would not have asked. The fear is what will help you show up, on days when nothing else would get you out of bed, because the fear knows what is at stake.
You are not broken. You are a woman who has been told something that would frighten anyone, and you are frightened, and you are also about to do something hard and get through it. Both of those things are true, and both of them are allowed to be true at the same time.
I Am On The Other Side Now
The fear changed shape. My life has continued. The things I was afraid of losing — most of them, not all of them — are still here, and the life I am building around them is in some ways better than the life I had before.
If I could send one message backward through time to the woman I was in the week before my first treatment, the message would be this: you are going to be more scared than you have ever been, and you are going to fight harder than you knew you could, and you are going to learn to use the fear for the rest of your life. Those three things are going to happen together, and what is on the other side is worth all the worries.
Cancer may take my life. It will not take today.
That is the sentence I want to leave you with.
When Fear Becomes Clinical
Everything above is about fear as a feeling, and the relationship a woman can build with it over time. But I want to be specific about something the post has not named directly.
Sometimes fear stops being fear and becomes something clinical.
Clinically significant anxiety is common in prolonged acute medical trauma. What cancer treatment puts a woman through — the waiting, the scans, the infusions, the recovery, the recurrence vigilance, the years of not-quite-knowing — qualifies as prolonged acute medical trauma in any reasonable definition of the term. Some women move through this and come out with a fear that remains manageable through the kinds of tools I have described above. Some women develop anxiety that is clinically significant and that deserves clinical attention.
The distinction is not always obvious from the inside. Anxiety that is disrupting your sleep most nights, that is making it hard to be present with the people you love, that is producing physical symptoms you cannot trace to the treatment itself, that is keeping you in a state of vigilance that does not relax even when the immediate threat does — that is worth mentioning to your doctors. It is not weakness. It is not a failure of the coping tools. It is a medical situation with medical management options, and those options are worth having.
There is a specific point to add here for women in cancer treatment. Some of the medications used in cancer therapy can make anxiety worse. Certain corticosteroids given alongside chemotherapy, certain hormonal therapies, and occasionally the underlying treatment drugs themselves can elevate anxiety in ways that are not just psychological but pharmacological. If your anxiety is worse than it was before treatment started, and worse than the situation alone would predict, it may be worth asking your oncology team whether any of your medications could be contributing. They can sometimes adjust dosing, time the administration differently, or add supportive treatments to address the side effect directly.
I have to say something about the stigma, because it still exists, and it stops women from getting help they need.
There is a cultural idea, still surprisingly strong in 2026, that needing medication or therapy for mental health is a sign of personal weakness. That you should be able to handle your own feelings. That strong women, capable women, women who have everything else under control do not ask for help with the inside of their heads. I am here to tell you this framing is wrong in general, and it is particularly wrong for a woman in cancer treatment.
The way to understand what has happened is this: acute trauma, including a cancer diagnosis, is like a physical wound to the brain. The assault on your nervous system is not metaphorical. The stress hormones you have been bathing your brain in for months have physical consequences. The medications in your chemotherapy regimen, and the corticosteroids that almost certainly came with them, have measurable effects on neurotransmitter systems. Aromatase inhibitors and tamoxifen alter hormonal environments that your brain has been running on for your entire adult life. The brain that made it through all of that is not the same brain, chemically, that you had before you started.
You are not a failure if you need help. You are simply rebalancing the chemicals that got unbalanced during treatment. It is not a reflection on you. It is a reality of what happened to you.
If you broke your leg, you would not refuse a cast because you should be able to walk through it. If your thyroid was damaged, you would not refuse thyroid medication because you should be able to regulate your own metabolism. The brain is an organ. It was injured. Treating the injury is how bodies heal, and your brain is a body part.
Your primary care doctor, your oncologist, a psychiatrist, and a therapist are all reasonable people to talk to about managing anxiety. Your cancer center may have a psychosocial oncology service specifically for this. There are medications that can help. There are therapy approaches — cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, trauma-focused therapy — with real evidence behind them for cancer-related anxiety. There are body-based practices that many women find helpful alongside anything else they are doing.
Lots of women manage cancer-related fear without formal clinical intervention. Lots of women also get help. It should be a conversation between you and your doctor. Taking something that helps you sleep through the night of a waiting-for-results week is not a character failure. Talking to someone trained to help you carry what you are carrying is not giving up. These are tools, and a woman who has been using every other tool available to her deserves to know that these tools exist, are legitimate, and are available to her too.
If what you are feeling is more than you want to carry — if it is harder to put down, more constant, more intrusive, more physical — please bring that up with someone on your medical team. They will know what to do, and they will not think less of you for asking.
The rest of this series covers the practical questions about treatment and skincare — what chemo does to your skin, which products actually help, how to think about the decisions your oncologist is asking you to make. Whenever you are ready for those, they are here. If you are not ready yet, and what you needed today was someone to tell you that the fear makes sense, that is what this post was for.
What to Read Next
What Skincare Is Best to Use During Cancer Treatment?
Should I Do Chemo? The Risks and the Rewards
The Author: Lindsey Walsh
Lindsey is founder and CEO of Juventude. A breast cancer survivor and cancer advocate. Lindsey built Juventude to provide effective skin care based on antioxidant-rich plants and without endocrine disrupting toxins.