Heather:

When I was initially diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease I characterized it as an act of terror.  By doing that I abnegated any responsibility for my circumstance. I did nothing wrong—there was nothing I could do to have prevented the disease, it was like getting on a bus that just happened to have a bomb on it.  I did not feel weak.  I did not feel that I was to blame.  It was a random, utterly arbitrary occurrence that just happened to have victimized me.  It would not come back.

When it did come back, my sense of disease as terrorism intensified.  It became a manifestation of fear.  Cancer was the terrorist bomb that could explode within my body at any moment.  I became jittery and tentative—vigilant to anything out of the ordinary.  I lived in fear, and I lived quietly, unwilling to make commitments to people or things, I locked myself indoors for worry of the terrorist threat within my body.

I am trying to stop that.

As always,

Anderson