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When you are dealing with cancer or another serious illness, whether as the patient or caregiver, your life will never be quite the same for any one of a number of reasons: you may have physical impairments caused by the illness, you may fear recurrence, etc. Whatever after-affects you feel, they will affect your ability to plan for the future and that, my friends, can cause enormous stress.
Something that we found to be quite stressful was making plans when we were uncertain about the future. My wife, Chris, had been through breast cancer and then, 18 months later, the cancer reappeared throughout her skeleton. After more chemo and radiation the cancer seemed to have disappeared and life went back to normal; perhaps I should say “as normal as it could be under the circumstances.” That was late 2005 and the demon cancer always lurked in the background of our minds, however, so how are we supposed to make any big plans when it might come back?
I’m here to tell you that you should not put your life on hold because of something that MIGHT happen. If you did, you would never do anything ever again! Given that you aren’t going to stop living, you have a couple of options: you can forge ahead and ignore potential problems with the attitude that you will deal with it if it happens, or you can go ahead cautiously, preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.
Naturally, a factor in this will be the size of the project or venture that you are planning. I certainly wouldn’t be afraid to make dinner reservations; planning a vacation in Europe, though, is different!
Here’s an example: I am an avid eclipse chaser, following total eclipses of the sun all over the world. I intend to go to every eclipse for the rest of my life, and the next eclipse after my wife’s cancer recurrence was going to be March 26, 2006. Naturally I wanted to go, and since we would enjoy this one from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Chris wanted to go with me. How can we make plans to go on an eclipse cruise when her cancer might come back? Is this a good idea? What if the cancer returned and we couldn’t go? It seemed kind of risky to me, almost reckless.
In this case we had options to minimize the impact of a new illness, so I purchased travel insurance after verifying that it would, in fact, cover us if her cancer came back. Yes, it was more expensive and yes, it would still cost a lot of money if we couldn’t go after making all of our plans but at least the bulk of the cost could be recovered.
Four days before we were going to leave, she had a seizure caused by tumors that had spread to her brain. Needless to say, we couldn’t go on our trip. The insurance paid for our cruise and we had to eat the other expenses, including re-deposit of the frequent flyer miles we used for our air, but it still saved us a lot of money. She was treated and the tumors have disappeared; it was quite a scare, though. (NOTE: Chris insisted that I find some other way to go to that eclipse, so I arranged a last-minute whirlwind trip that took me from Los Angeles to Turkey and back in 67 hours; but that’s another story…)
The point is that you should not avoid making plans just because of something that MIGHT happen. You can still make plans to do what you want to do, just take prudent precautions to minimize the risk involved.
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