As creatures of hope, we are capable of wondrous imagination and extraordinary creativity. It’s the foundation of our magnificence, of our ability to create beauty and art, the Sistine Chapel, the statue of David, Hamlet, La Boheme. It makes us the little Energizer Battery Bunnies of life. We keep going and going. It is the foundation of the vision and genius that enables us to discover penicillin, to map the human genome, and to develop Taxol.

This ability, however, creates some dilemmas. It also leads to our fantasy of control over cause and effect. For example, in our culture, medicine and science rest on assumptions about our ability to determine cause and effect, the ability to predict and control, knowing all along what we learned in Pysch 101, correlation isn’t causation. Now don’t I sound like a party pooper. But …. two things happening at the same time, most likely mean absolutely nothing.

Despite all the evidence around us that things just happen, we approach bad things by trying to find causality. Although on one hand, this offers a palliative hope of control, on the other hand, it often causes a lot of needless stress and self blame. We want to believe that eating enough broccoli can prevent cancer. That if someone else gets a recurrence, it’s because they weren’t exercising as much as they should have, as much as we are.

I caused my cancer; we believe. It will come back if I do… whatever. It won’t come back if I do…whatever else. We all make up our own whatever’s. At sometime after diagnosis, most women come up with their personal theory about why they got cancer. It was because…those whatever’s. But the truth is, we don’t know why one woman gets breast cancer, and why one woman doesn’t. We just don’t know.

One woman told me she was shocked to find out that a friend had a recurrence. She vehemently asserted that her friend had eaten a completely macrobiotic diet, exercised daily, did yoga and still…cancer. When I got diagnosed, my step son said to me with indignant shock, but you’re the healthiest person I know. I was one of those people that could check off every item on that list of what you should do to be healthy and ward off disease. I was doing all the right things and I still got cancer.

Then my unconscious said to the cancer, I’ll show you. So, I proceeded to take control of giving up control and I stopped exercising, drank a lot of wine, ate a lot of brownies and gained twenty-five pounds. I kept getting on the scale. You know how they’re weighing you all the time during treatment. I’d say, cancer’s really fattening.

Now I’m trying to find some balance between knowing what I can control and what I can’t and how I want to live and establish quality of life for myself within that uncertainty. Finding some balance. You know what I realized? Fat or thin, I’m still gonna die. It’s not good news. It’s not bad news. It’s not even news. It just is. And it doesn’t matter what the definition of is, is. So what matters is how I live, day by day, moment by moment, mammogram by mammogram, martini by martini, laughing, loving, and at times even feeling like I will live forever.