"It Can't Be Cancer!"

My father passed away this past July with digestive complications after 18 months in hospice care.? It was painful to watch; in the final months, my two sisters and I took over many of the intense 24-hour duties of administering pain meds at home while our 81-year-old mother stood by in her early stages of dementia and could be of no help at all.???

Waking up at midnight, 2 am, 4 am and beyond to give meds to Dad was exhausting, but we traded off shifts and were all willing to sacrifice for this man who had done so much for us.?

Once he passed, I began to feel terrible symptoms of itching, night sweats, and discomfort while trying to sleep, while a decent-sized lump had appeared on the left side of my neck.? The doctors I saw did several glandular tests but without seeing anything definite chalked it up to stress and depression from my dad’s death.?

I knew this wasn’t right.? “Something’s wrong with me!” I kept saying to the specialists in tears.? Four biopsies were done in my neck, all of them inconclusive.? Weeks of sleepless nights and discomfort continued until finally an endocrinologist friend looked at my neck and knew instantly what was going on: “You have lymphoma.”?

Lymphoma?? Blood cancer?

I felt relieved and terrified at the same time.? It had to be verified, but finally someone that could tell me what I had that I could take steps to fix!? Why could no one else tell me what was going on? Whose fault is this?

In that moment, I instantly realized that was the wrong question to ask

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REVELATION:

Why was I wasting precious energy blaming someone or something when I ought to apply that energy toward a solution?

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When we’re faced with something negative:

-????????????? Don’t waste time seeking to blame.? Nothing is solved by blaming.? An nour, a week, a month from now no one will care whose fault it is.? There may be reason to look into it later, but there are things you need to do right now to move you forward from where you are.

-????????????? Take ownership of your situation.? Your circumstances are your own, and no one else can affect them one way or the other.? Move quickly in the direction of a solution.

-????????????? Make a plan.? Your next moves could very well affect the entire outcome of the situation.? Assess where you are, have a plan, and take ACTION.? ?

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I needed an oncologist, a diagnosis and a PLAN far more than I needed to know who dropped the ball. Are you wasting time on the blame game, or are you choosing to make forward progress?

If you found value in this piece and you TOOK action on something, please let me know below.? I’ll be right here next to the IV bag.

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Bill Guertin is a longtime sports sales trainer, co-founder of ISBI 360 and known to many as The 800-Pound Gorilla of Peak Performance.? “#GorillaStrong: Life, Cancer and Possibilities” is a collection of observations along his current journey in battling non-Hodgkin’s T-cell lymphoma.?