A Drop in the Ocean, A Drop in the Well: Perspectives on Chronic Illness 

The wind tugged on the fragile line of my new ‘boogie’ board. I gripped the board’s edges tightly. Soon, crashing Northeastern waves surpassed my hairline and rendered my limbs defenseless to the shifting sand beneath me. I pushed my shaking toes into the sand and felt the burning sensation of miniscule shells as they pressed into my pruned skin. I felt a fissure begin to form in the brittle styrofoam and shivered with fear. What would my father think of me if I were to break his gift to me after only one use? I feared not the ocean that desired to consume me. I feared myself. I feared that I would disappoint my father. My fear of failing my father extended beyond the ocean limits into all aspects of my early life. The eleven year old girl who lingered beneath the surface secretly waited for her father. She hid below, so he would find her.

As I sank further into the oceanic abyss, I rejected the anatomical limits of my untrained breath. I knew I could not physically sustain submersion in this quiet depth for more than a few seconds; yet, I yearned for nothing more than to preserve the conclave between myself and the sea. My quivering lungs interrupted my pensive state and propelled me toward the unrestrained squeals of clumsy toddlers and a pastiche of striped umbrellas and pastel folding chairs. I stared away from the crowded shore toward an aquamarine horizon littered with distant sailboats. The rapid rise and fall of my chest as my lungs oxygenated contradicted the stillness of the rest of my body. The cacophony of sounds on a beach I had grown up on was suddenly foreign. I thirsted for the enduring rush of salt water that whispered to me just a minute before.

My breathlessness had not been the absence of life but, rather, the discovery of a contemplative sanctuary amidst mortal chaos. The summer of my eleventh year, the ocean became for me a perpetual contradiction. In my ten seconds of breathlessness, I uncovered an introspective life unfathomable above the surface. The helplessness with which I fell hostage to strong waves converted into personal power —my ability to control my own breath. The small fragment of ocean convinced me of Rumi’s prophetic affirmation: 

​

        “You [Sarah] are not a drop in the ocean.
          You [Sarah] are the entire ocean, in a drop.”

When cancer entered into my life ten years later, it came crashing in just as the waves upon the Northeastern shoreline did on that summer day of my youth, testing the limits of both my body and mind like never before. I knew pain. Within the span of those years, I struggled with various mental health diagnoses and watched my father lose his life to his own depression. However, my diagnosis with cardiac angiosarcoma was the first wave of a more sustained hurricane. Cancer is a hurricane not characterized by the ruthless force of one wave alone, but by its ebb and flow, by the enduring unsteadiness it provokes. 
Rumi was right.

I am an entire ocean and, within this ocean, there is a storm that is here to stay. As with enduring storms, cancer has periods of chaos and calm. Waves change in frequency and in size and, as we learn to keep our heads above water, we often realize that we are much stronger and more resourceful than we thought ourselves to be. When you are in the middle of the ocean, waves crashing above your head, and sharks nipping at your feet, you either find a lifesaver, build one, or become your own. I’ve found myself in all three situations throughout my diagnosis. I have found lifesavers in friends and family and have constructed lifesavers in the form of writing, the arts, chosen family, and community. Though, I, too, have been my own lifesaver.

 
As I drown in the tears of my own grief, my arms pull me out of the depths. I hug my arms tightly against my sides. The little girl who once waited for her father to save her now saves herself. Dad is gone now. I am alone. I am tired of being sick. What if I let the waves consume me? I allow the thunderous waters to slap the back of my neck four times over. Living with cancer can appear, at times, a sunny summer landscape. I smile and pose on the palm-lined boardwalk with a full face of make up, a wig, and my friends covering my swollen legs (a symptom of the chemotherapy). Suddenly, my 1000 followers on Instagram see the “sunny side of sarcoma". However, behind this post card hides three hundred sixty four others, where the palms lose their limbs to catastrophic winds and the sand rises up above my neck as it threatens to erase me from the picture altogether. 

An initial cancer diagnosis is a tempest that causes mass destruction in the major structures of one’s life. My diagnosis and the fatal symptoms that led to it flooded my notions of the future I had mapped out for myself and left it like a sodden book with indecipherable pages. I laid in a hospital bed and watched my independence to work, further my education, and remain on the 'straight path’ of my peers wash away into an unreachable horizon of blue.

Cancer is both a destroyer and a builder by nature. On a biological level, the disease is the rapid growth of cells, which often results in the destruction of surrounding anatomical structures. Beyond a physiological standpoint, I believe cancer can be both a destroyer and a builder as well; however, for cancer to be a catalyst of reconstruction in our daily lives, we have to open ourselves to this possibility. 
 

I recently took a step back and observed the rubble left by the storm of my initial cancer diagnosis. I wish I could say that I had converted all of the rubble into diamonds, every infusion into hope, every hospital stay into a lesson in patience, but I would be twisting the truth far from my lived reality. My recent reflection overwhelmed me with grief for my past, present, and future. As I reviewed the ruins, I thought of the trips I had to cancel this year, the graduate program I had to cut short, and my bittersweet observation of proposals, baby announcements, and job promotions that fall beyond my new scope of life (Despite me having survived months beyond my initial “expiration date,” my prognosis still haunts me and clouds my perception of the future).

If you keep taking from a well without replenishing it, you end up with a dry well. This statement seems obvious; yet, so many of us, sick or not, end up like this unreplenished well. The crashing waves brought on by the hurricane of my diagnosis now convert into the barrenness brought on by the drought of chronic illness. The longer I live with chronic cancer, the more complex my relationship with the illness becomes. Each day the disease drains me before I even get out of bed. I now start my day with a well fifty percent full, rather than ninety five percent full; however, remember I said cancer can be a catalyst for reconstruction? How do we allow our experiences of cancer to reconstruct our days, rather than solely demolish them?

There is no one correct answer and, for some of you, cancer may be incapable of holding any “redemptive” quality. Yet, when I cannot find a drop in the well, I aim to ask myself this: "What have I gained in the last year and a half since my diagnosis?" As I recall these “gains,” water, albeit rain or tears, fresh water or salt water, trickles into the well’s depths and brings me nourishment. It is through my experience of cancer’s destruction, that I have built deep and long-lasting connections with patients, nurses, doctors, friends, family, and strangers. It is through my body’s need to slow down that I have noticed the minute details and beauty of the natural world and the other living beings around me. Cancer tries to take my life each day; however, in the midst of its thievery, the disease opens my eyes to limitless ways in which we are able to rethink “living” beyond the scientific sense of the word. There will rarely be a hurricane quite like the initial diagnosis, where entire structures are dismantled for the first time, but there will be many rainstorms to follow, ones where tears and memories will flood your well. During the rainstorms, I hold on tightly to my greatest lifesaver: the goodness in humanity that shines through the walls that the cancer tears down. I see it in the hospital room when my friends gathered upon my first admission. I see it on social media when we, as a cancer community, put aside our differences to dance, pray, donate, and spread awareness for fellow patients. I see it in the eyes of my retired nurse who continues to sit by my side at infusions, despite her retirement. It is this humanity that fills my well and reminds me of the abundance of life that remains even in the midst of the destructive force of disease.