That 'why me?' moment

Most of the doctors I've talked to have said that stress plays an important part in our well-being. However, they have pointed out, there is no real evidence of a link between prolonged stress and cancer. Talking to nurses, though, has resulted in a different view; when people have been subject to stress over a prolonged period, it seems they quite often develop a serious illness when the source of stress is removed.

This is something I have observed in my own family. My mother cared for my disabled father and for her own father in the last years of his life. Although she did it willingly, it was stressful, since she never knew when she might have to deal with an emergency. Roughly a year after her father died, she developed angina, resulting in her own emergency admission to hospital. And then, six months after my parents moved house to a part of the country they had always dreamed of retiring to, my father died unexpectedly. Wihin a year, my mother had developed polymyalgia of such severity that she was unable even to lift her toothbrush. There is no evidence of a causal relationship between her two bereavements and her illness, but...

And me? For the last four years of her life, my mother was subjected to numerous hospital investigations and I often found her collapsed at home on my daily visits to see her. Finally, the last 57 days of her life were spent in intensive care on a ventilator. She caught infection after infection and, eventually, died in undignified and deeply distressing circumstances. Within a year, I had become extremely unwell. A year after that? My diagnosis.

Apparently, one of the things that everyone asks when told they have cancer is, "why me?" I had thought that this wasn't something I'd asked - my first thought on being given my diagnosis was, "Thank goodness - now I can get appropriate treatment". On reflection though, I have asked that question. Although I haven't found the answer, it does seem that "why me?" comes in various shapes and cunning diguises. So, my "why me?" moment was not so much, "why me?" as "why now?"