12 mm. I can't even remember when I first found the little lump in my right breast. As big as an M&M candy. The non-peanut kind. And much more lethal. Six months, (and laying on the operating room table) later, there I was, stunned and crying, after hearing my diagnosis of Ductal carcinoma in situ aka It's-very-early-Cancer-of-the-breast. 

Learning you have cancer has a way of distilling the moment into megabytes seared into your hard drive: the memory of thinking I might not see my kids grow up; the realisation that it was so trivial to fight with him about that thing "I can't even remember why we fought"; the regret that I might never see that retirement home we were planning by the beach. More than a physical fight, the Big C is a big war with your mind, heart and spirit. There are treatments for the physical condition, but how does your mind and spirit go on living while this thing ravages inside of you? In those early days, I found strength in thinking about all the positives in the predicament; how we caught it early, how the survival rates for this type of cancer were excellent...truly it was a challenge to find the positives, when life-at-risk was the heavy weight on the other end of the scale.

Fast forward almost 5 cancer free years later. That dark time of my life came zooming back into my memory when in one year, so many people close to me were diagnosed with the Big C. My husband; the mother of my sister-in-law's husband; my own sister-in-law; my young yoga student; my buddy from college.  It is worse, it turns out, to see someone you love suffer from cancer, than it is for you to have it yourself. The feeling of helplessness seems magnified millions of times. The caregiver gig is not for the fainthearted, and it is oftentimes a thankless task. And then to be a survivor AND a caregiver is a really weird place to be in. You know what the person is going through, and yet you don't know. The Big C can be a very lonely, cavernous and painful place. Everyone knows about it, and yet NO ONE really knows how you feel if you have it. And it has this darned way of making everyone else around you feel helpless. Why strike so many people close to me? 

Why? The Big C has a talent for bringing this question up in spades, and an even greater talent for prohibiting any answers. There are no answers to the questions "why me", "why did it happen", "what did I do to bring it on"? I've come to the conclusion that asking "Why" is a useless exercise that leads to more desperation. Do not dwell on the why. I think the only thing one can do, is to look forward, to wrap yourself in an armour of positive thoughts and energy. After all, what do you have to lose? In living a life with cancer or any difficulty, I am reminded of the saying "there is more than one way to go through life, being pulled kicking and screaming."  It's like an extreme adventure challenge, but the trick is to find the silver lining in a very dark cloud. Find the positivity in the predicament of speeded-up mortality realisation.

Sitting in the gompa of Tushita, Dharmasala a few months ago, studying Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, I stumbled across this passage in Lama Zopa Rinpoche's book, "The Joy of Compassion" and for me, it was like a light was switched on: "Cancer or other serious illnesses can be taken as a very positive sign, because it means that the person will not have to experience many hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of heavy suffering results in the lower realms for the incredible lengths of time from just one negative karma. That karma manifests as an illness in this life and finishes in that way. In such cases, it's a very positive, very good thing that happened...we should see them as positive and recognise them as signs of the power of our practice--that they are the manifestations of negative karma that is finishing much more lightly than it could have--and see them as positive." 

I have found great peace in this passage. Yes, it presupposes a belief in reincarnation. Suffering from cancer made me a believer in reincarnation. The belief in reincarnation is what gave me strength to get through that time---to realise that my current life was but a drop in the ocean of my endless existence took away the power of the Big C. The purpose of this blog is not to talk about religious beliefs, is not to convince anyone about reincarnation, nor give an explanation thereof. I just think it is important to share what I found to be a profound Buddhist teaching and insight into a very commonplace human suffering. In Tibetan Buddhism, we are taught to meditate on death, to realise the impermanence of everything and to prepare our lives at every moment, for that which is inevitable. If death is inevitable, then one must live one's life to the best of one's ability, and to cultivate a heart of compassion for the suffering of others, not simply our own suffering, and to have an urgent desire to relieve others of their suffering. To cultivate the sincere wish to end the suffering of others through our own life's effort. As we are responsible for all that happens to us, be it in the past or present, good or bad, so too do we have the ability to make our lives into what we would want it to be, always shaped by a compassion for the well-being of others. 

I am one of the lucky ones. I am waiting for April 2013 to be able to wave my "Cancer Survivor" flag up high. I cannot wait. For all those fighting the good fight,  and to the caregivers, my heart goes out to you and I say a mantra for your strength, perseverance and joy. The Big C brought me so many blessings; I found meditation as I needed to calm my raging mind, I was led to yoga almost by destiny; and thousands of hours meditating and teaching yoga later, I can only thank the Universe for bringing me to that crossroad of illness that change my life, and that of my family, indelibly for the better. 

"What is the best way of overcoming cancer and all other illnesses through meditation, with your own mind? It is by developing compassion, by generating compassion for the suffering of others." ~Lama Zopa Rinpoche