Acceptance Is Where You Begin

Acceptance Is Where You Begin

A month earlier, I had been running, having fun, living my life.

Now I was lying in pre-op waiting for brain surgery.

Your mind travels backward in a place like that. What was I doing last month? How did I get from there to here? Did I do something wrong? Was there something I should have noticed?

And underneath all of it was the question that still had no answer.

What is it?

The scans had shown something in my brain. Surgery would remove what could be removed. But uncertainty followed me into the waiting room.

Then it all went dark.

I awoke with what felt like a massive bowling ball on my head.

Soon pathology gave what had been inside me a name.

Glioblastoma.

One uncertainty disappeared and another immediately took its place.

What happens now?

Even the people around you begin to look different. The familiar smiles from friends and relatives are replaced by something more serious. They have questions too. They are frightened too. Everyone is searching for something certain to hold onto.

That is when the statistics arrive.

Survival rates. Median survival. Percentages. Probabilities.

When you are frightened, numbers can feel solid. When they come from someone in a white coat, they carry the authority of medicine. Family and friends hear them too. In a world that has suddenly become uncertain, the numbers can begin to feel like the future itself.

I held onto them too.

Statistics matter. They represent what has happened to people before us. They help doctors understand cancer and make decisions.

But there is a difficult distinction to make when you are the patient.

A statistic is not a personal forecast.

It can tell you about a population. It cannot tell you exactly what will happen to you.

For me, that was where acceptance began.

Not accepting that a predicted outcome would happen. Not surrendering to a prognosis.

Accepting the predicament.

This is where I am.

I also stopped spending energy looking for someone or something to blame. Why me? What did I do? Could I have prevented this? Those questions may be natural, but I was going to need my energy everywhere else.

And then came something harder.

I had to stop searching for certainty where certainty did not exist.

No doctor could know my future. No statistic could know it. I couldn’t know it either.

So rather than fear uncertainty, I began to embrace it.

Because uncertainty has another side.

Possibility.

The diagnosis was real. The challenge was real. But if the future could not be known, then it had not already been written.

Acceptance did not make me passive.

It gave me a place to stand.

From there, I could begin to take agency over what came next.

Now what?

Continue the journey

Next: Somewhere

Back to The Journey