One of the most common things people ask me is if I’m worried about the treatment to come, with operation, chemo and radiation. I’m not. They ask if I’m worried about the future. I’m not. In their faces, I can sometimes see that they want to ask if I’m worried that I won’t survive this ordeal. If they had asked, I would have replied that I’m not.

I know that worrying won’t help a bit. It would most likely make everything a whole lot worse. I’m not in control of the cancer, or the treatment, or the future. Worrying causes stress, and stress makes everything worse, that I do know.

I call it the Andy Warhol philosophy. I’ve always been a fan of him, mostly cos of Velvet Underground. I’ve read many books about Warhol and The Factory, and one of my favourites is The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). My life has never been easy, but this tidbit of philosophy has helped me since I was a teenager:

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, “So what.”
“My mother didn’t love me.” So what.
“My husband won’t ball me.” So what.
“I’m a success but I’m still alone.” So what.
I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.”

Apparently, the “So what-therapy” is now called Metacognitive Therapy (MCT), and it works, say researchers (Norwegian article here). I could have told them that a long time ago. The ideas have been around for a while but Wells & Matthews (1996) used the information processing model that Wells later reworked into Metacognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression (2011).

I’m not claiming that it’s easy. You need to change your entire way of thinking, from worrying about the future to accepting fate at the same time as not believing in this thing called fate. There is a big difference between leaning back and thinking that “fate” will rule your world and accepting that there are some things in life that YOU cannot change.

I can’t control the outcome of my surgery, because I will be a passive pawn. I can, however, make sure that I’ve prepared physiologically as well as I can. I can’t control how my body will react to chemo but I can follow the advice of others: mostly low carb and light exercise.

And if everything still goes to shit and I don’t survive: So what. I won’t be around to worry about that.

Waldo Jeffers worried, and just see how much good it did him…