Do something difficult.
Close your eyes and go back to before. Not last week. Not last year. Before that. Go back to when you woke up in the morning and didn’t think about your inventory. When your body carried you through the day, without complaint, and you never thanked it. You went through your life like everyone else. Unaware. Slow. Ordinary. Just as it was meant to be.
You had a normal life. Try to remember that. We both had the chance to forget it.
You did normal things. You made plans and kept them. You spent time with the people you love, doing ordinary things, and that was enough. You drove somewhere without checking whether you’d have the energy to make it back. Laughter came without you measuring the cost. You woke up on a Tuesday and thought only about Tuesday. There was a country called Normal, and you lived in it, but you never named it because you didn’t need to. It was just part of your life. That’s how it is with the things we can’t imagine losing.
Something changed.
Don’t soften it by calling it an obstacle in the road or a chapter in your story or one of the many nice things people say when they don’t know what else to say. Something evil showed up in your life without asking and changed everything. You got sick. Not the kind of sick that keeps you on the couch for a few days and earns sympathy. I’m talking about the kind of sickness that gets into the structure of your daily life and breaks it apart. The kind of sickness that introduces you to rooms, words, and fears you never knew existed. The kind that stays.
Serious illness doesn’t knock softly at your door. It moves in. From that point on, you are doing a new job, and it is a hard one, waking up each morning and functioning. Staying present. Staying civil. Keeping the storm inside you from spilling onto everyone else, even when everything in you wants to lie down and pretend this is manageable. That takes more courage than most people realize. More than you probably give yourself credit for.
Somewhere in all that effort, normal disappears.
Normal doesn’t vanish at once. At first, you can still feel it. You can still see your old life clearly and feel its shape. But as the days go on, as the appointments keep coming, and as the fatigue builds, the work of getting through each day takes all your attention. Little by little, your memory of the life you had before begins to fade. It slips away like a shoreline worn down by water. You keep reaching for it, and one day you realize you have stopped reaching because you can’t remember exactly where it was.
That is my view after decades as a surgeon, watching many patients arrive at this exact place, where loss and endurance meet. I tried, with mixed results, to meet them there honestly, after they began to feel their ordinary life disappear in slow motion. I knew it professionally. I thought I knew it personally.
As a patient myself, I learned there is a difference.
Now I know, in a way I couldn’t before, that symptoms no lab test can show are just as real as the ones a test can measure. A hard knot of frustration in your chest. Fear that wakes you at 3 a.m. and won’t settle down. Anger at the plain unfairness of it all, arriving uninvited and leaving emptiness behind. Sadness that shows up without warning and answers to no one. Grief for a part of yourself you didn’t know you’d miss until it was gone. None of that is weakness. It’s the real interior weather of serious illness, and it deserves to be named.
I know something else too. Under all of it, under the fear, the exhaustion, and the longing for what used to be, you are still here. You got up today. You made it through another day. You carried what you carry without putting it on someone who couldn’t hold it. That is not small. Don’t let anyone, including you, tell you it is.
I want to talk about normal again, because we have come this far together. Stop trying to find your way back to it. Not because it wasn’t real, and not because you don’t have every right to grieve it. Grieve it. Mourn it. Let yourself feel the loss. But the country you lived in before no longer exists, and all the energy you spend trying to return to a place that is gone will take away from the life in front of you now. Even with the limits serious illness brings, there are parts of this life worth holding onto.
I believe joy doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. It lives in the present, in the small and unrepeatable moments inside an ordinary day, a conversation that catches you off guard and makes you laugh, a cup of coffee made just right, an actual quiet moment that reaches you. Those things are here, in your current life, not the one you had before. This one.
If you need more stories and support, compassionatevoices.org offers information and educational materials on cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
And I want to say one more thing, because I don’t hear it said enough. Even with all you carry, you still matter to other people in ways suffering can’t erase. Your presence, even when it’s changed, even when it’s limited, even on hard days, can reach someone else in a way health never could. Pain gives you something to share, not something that makes you less useful or less worthy. Don’t let the disease fool you about that.
So this is where I want to leave you.
Get up, not because today will be easy, and not because it will feel like a good day. Get up because you are still here, and that is not an accident. Meet the day in front of you, this day and no other, and let it be what it is.
You are stronger than you know. Harder to wear down than the disease wants you to believe. And the world, even when it seems to notice only a little, is better with you in it.
