“I don’t think we spend enough time talking about ‘left of surviving’,” My Unlikely Friend said. 

I don’t exactly remember when this conversation of ours occurred. 

It may have been soon after my husband moved out, when my days looked like: Get out of bed. Eat food. Bathe. Take care of the dog. Talk to a human. Make it back to bed.

What we were talking about was based on a concept we teach at O2X: surviving → living → thriving.

In workshops, participants are asked to identify what it looks like for them to be just surviving. What it looks like to be thriving. When in their lives they were in these stages. I’d sit in our workshops in the many months following my divorce watching members of the team ask the participants where they were in the continuum that day.

At the time, I was in surviving. Barely. It’s more likely that I was “left of surviving.”

But life has a funny way of adjusting your scales on its own terms. 

What was “left of surviving” then pales in comparison to what I’ve been experiencing these last few weeks as my body has moved from what I see now as the far left extreme of survival to…somewhere on the scale I can’t even identify. 

While I don’t feel prepared to divulge to the interwebs the full extent of the emotion that was coming up (we’ll save that for the book and future posts), I will share what I intellectually understand was happening.

My last round of chemotherapy (of this set) was Tuesday, May 19th. Per usual, I felt like shit that whole week. Or, as I’m now starting to understand in hindsight, my body was in true survival mode that week—using every ounce of energy it had to keep me alive from the poison that had been pumped into it for the sixth time in under three months.

“FOLFOX was pitched to me as,” a new friend who was also diagnosed with stage three rectal cancer said, “‘we’re going to give you as much as we can to kill the cancer and not kill you.’”

I read this text through a stream of tears while sitting on a bed at my mom’s house two and a half weeks after that final infusion day—when I was at the beach, intending to have a fun and relaxing, celebratory 10-day vacation.

My nervous system had a completely different plan. 

There’s a thing that happens inside you when you step out of survival mode, crisis, extreme high-stress situations, and into a space where you feel just a little bit safe—whether that be a physical location or around safe people—where your nervous system feels ok enough to stand down just a little. And that’s when all of the emotions, physical sensations, and what feels like inexplicable insanity begin to emerge.

And it is terrifying.

I know this because I used to teach this. I used to be responsible for creating that safe space and being the safe person that allowed people’s nervous systems to stand down and for them to subsequently fall apart and release what had been stored for weeks, months, or years. I was very good at it. I have sat with many, many very tough adult men as they have lost their shit in front of me following combat tours, abuse, addiction.

Until this whole cancer thing I thought I had been able to sit with myself and feel safe with myself in the moments when my nervous system needed to stand down too.

Which may have been the case before.

But it is not the case now.

Over the course of the ten days of that “vacation,” and the days that have followed since, in some form or another, I have experienced:

• Uncontrollable crying
• Waking up shaking in the middle of the night
• Shaking in the middle of the day
• Hot flashes
• Chills
• Extraordinary fatigue
• Inability to fall or stay asleep
• Loss of appetite
• Inability to make decisions
• Extremely depressive thoughts (warranting a couple emergency therapy sessions)
• No desire to see or speak to any friends
• A complete loss of everything that had been bringing me joy—writing, daydreaming about buying property, taking long hikes, leading workshops and retreats
• Intense triggers around seeing families on the beach
• A sense of overwhelm about my future so intense that every bit of it seems completely impossible to tackle.

And more.

In one of my therapy sessions that week I cried and said, “What do I do? How do I stop? I don’t know how to make it to the end of the day.”

She had told me the week before, “You are not getting out of this. You have to get through this.”

I didn’t—and don’t—know how to get through this. 

One day at a time doesn’t seem to be working.

“That’s too much,” she said, “You just need to make it to the next breath.”

She asked me, what is the smallest possible thing you can do to interrupt the cycle?

Stand up.
Walk across a room.
Literally put one puzzle piece into another.

I’d like to say I did this and all is fixed and I’m much better now.

That is not the case.

Because what got really loud when my nervous system got to stand down were all the things that were too painful to feel before, things that couldn’t continue to be fully felt. 

My life shifted from being totally turned upside down to being in literal danger.

And when life is in danger, there is no time to feel.

You execute the crisis plan.

Even when the crisis plan itself—surgeries, chemotherapy—asks your body to endure more danger.

In other words:

I had to survive survival.

A few days before Christmas I had my second breast biopsy. We needed to biopsy this second area of concern that was found on my mammogram because the first had come back as positive for DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ – breast cancer, stage zero). In the same appointment, we did an ultrasound to see if we could find the third area of concern that had popped up on an MRI the week before. I was going to have to wait five more weeks for an MRI breast biopsy if we couldn’t find the area on the ultrasound. If we could find it, we could do an ultrasound guided biopsy and save some time.

I was laying back on the exam table, my torso slightly elevated, gown off the left side of my body, left boob hanging out while a stranger squeezed cold gel on me and pressed the ultrasound machine around and across the breast that had just been biopsied. She’d been doing this job for 20 years. 

I asked her, “I know you’re probably not supposed to answer this question, but if this biopsy comes back as positive too, what would you do? Lumpectomy? Mastectomy?”

Mastectomy, she said. A double.

I asked why.

She said that while she’d been doing this job for a long time she never really liked the word “survivor.”

Until one of her regular mammograms came back showing an area of suspicion. She too had to have a biopsy.

She told me in the week after her biopsy her anxiety took over. Her thoughts. What she had seen in patients she now had to face herself. She didn’t sleep. She thought about her mortality.

Her results came back negative.

“I got it then,” she told me. “What it means to be a survivor. It’s not just the physical side of this. It’s the mental. It would take me down. I’d have them remove both my breasts because my mind wouldn’t be able to handle the unknown. To me, that’s what ‘survivor’ means. It means you survived the mental.”

She said she’s not looked at her patients the same way since.

For me, what showed up in the nervous system stand-down that happened at the beach—and continues to happen—was:

Grief.

Loneliness.

Betrayal.

Jealousy.

Fear.

Abandonment.

Sadness.

Regret.

Feeling like a mistake.

Feeling like I don’t matter.

Feeling like a decade of my life was for nothing.

Feeling like I made a mistake not having kids, made a mistake marrying into the military, made a mistake not having a steady career.

Not knowing where to begin rebuilding:

Job.

Home.

Love.

Beating two cancers at the same time.

“It’s too much,” I choked out a few times between the deluge of tears.

It’s too much.

Let’s be very honest about that.

It is too much for one nervous system to handle.

It’s enough to break you.

On my drive home from the beach, I called My Unlikely Friend. Not because I wanted to talk. Because I was afraid to be alone with my thoughts.

“How was the beach?!” he asked.

I told him it was unsafe for me to tell him what was going on while I was operating a motor vehicle.

So while I drove I listened to him tell me about his week and I remembered our conversation about “left of surviving.” 

I thought about my conversation with my former client, friend, and former Green Beret Matthew, that I had on the way to the beach.

“It’s trauma, Alli,” he said. “You know this. It’s trauma after trauma after trauma for you. It’s nothing like what I experienced.”

Multiple combat tours. Seeing friends take their lives in front of him. 

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.

“OK,” he replied. “But I signed up for that. You did not sign up for this.”

I did not sign up for this.

Any of this.

And yet here we are: faced with multiple back-to-back traumas that have to be conquered because if they are not, I will literally die.

This, I see now, is what it means to be left of surviving.

 

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