I Got Cancer Just As COVID Hit. It’s Shocking How People Reacted In The Years That Followed.

I’ve had two big “C’s” in my life, and they happened at the same time. Five years ago, at age 46, just as the other big “C” was hitting the United States, I found a lump in my breast. I was reminded of this last month when I had my bi-yearly scans, which showed (thankfully) I’m still cancer-free.

Five years is a big deal in cancer terms because if you make it that long without any recurrence, the chances of it coming back drop significantly. When I announced this news to a group of friends, it was met with encouraging sentiments and applause. I was touched but not surprised. I knew that “C” was the one I could talk about; it was the other one I couldn’t.

I learned this lesson early on, in the spring of 2021, sitting at a barbecue. After surgery and treatments, I had been quarantined in my house for almost a year, and this was one of my first social outings. Perched on an outdoor sofa, I listened to two women beside me talk about how the virus had affected their children’s sports schedules and how boring their social lives had been during the last year.

“Enough is enough,” one of them said with so much conviction you’d think she was a lawyer trying a case. “The whole thing was a bunch of bullshit!”

I excused myself, went to the bathroom, sat on a closed toilet seat, and cried. Had we just had the same year? It felt like they must have been living in some kind of parallel universe. Did they not understand what it was like in the hospital? How could they want to just go on with their lives without at least acknowledging the depth of what had just happened to the world?

Memories from those early days of COVID haunted me: the sidewalk outside the hospital where I sobbed as I hugged my husband goodbye on the day of my surgery. The terror in every set of eyes I met once inside. The empty hallways. The workers in full PPE. The way the nurses would do their best not to touch me. The patient who was rolled past me in a hospital bed with a plastic hood over his head. The caution tape.

How the doctor said, “If you get the virus, we won’t be able to treat you.” How I scrubbed my skin raw each time I returned home. How I laid awake night after night, wondering if tomorrow would be the day I’d catch the virus and die. How I needed a good mask, but there were none to buy and watched protesters on the news raging against having to wear one at all. How the government said not to panic, but more people got sick and died. And how the president said, “Just stay calm. It will go away,” but it didn’t for a long, long time.

How do you just forget that?

Yet, in the months that followed, I would hear variations of that same conversation over and over. The consensus seemed to be that we, as a society, needed to move on from COVID as fast as possible without looking back — no time for reflection, no time for empathy, no time for remembrance. And for the most part, we did just that.

There were indications this may not have been the best plan — after the pandemic, cases of depression and anxiety rose significantly. By 2022, the World Health Organization cited a 25% increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide (and that’s only the cases that were reported). I wasn’t just an observer of those statistics, I was one of them. This thing that happened was in my DNA now whether I wanted it to be or not. And although I could see the attraction to put the blinders on, I just couldn’t seem to keep them up.

It started with anxiety attacks in crowded places. It moved on to ruminating over the slightest changes in my body — a tickle in my throat, a headache, a sneeze. The COVID and the cancer were enmeshed in my mind, so much so that a part of me believed if I succumbed to the first, the other would surely follow. My thoughts, which before the pandemic, had been filled with things like work assignments, my own kid’s game schedules and social plans, were overtaken by an all-consuming fear.

But when friends asked, “How are you doing?” I always replied, “Good,” because that is what I should’ve been, even if I wasn’t.

Logic told me if I acted like the person I was in March of 2020, I would become her again. So, I said yes when I got invitations, even though I wanted to say no. I smiled through cocktail parties and work events. I told myself: This is what people do, and the more you do it, the easier it will get.

I took the subway, went to the theater, traveled, and said: If all these other people are doing it, it must be safe. And even when, amid those things, I did get a mild case of COVID and recovered, the anxiety remained.

The aftermath of a traumatic event can lead to anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and problems with emotional regulation (such as irritability and anger). I was experiencing almost all of those things and knew I couldn’t suppress them any longer, so I began therapy. Week after week, I told my story, and as I did, the worry finally began to fade.

I learned that a common coping mechanism when people experience trauma is a detachment from thoughts and feelings. And as I grasped how this was true in relation to myself, I started to wonder: Is that what we, as a society, have done as well? After enduring one period of isolation, did we forgo grieving collectively in the aftermath to avoid feeling things that were too hard to hold?

Today, I live very much the way I did before COVID and cancer, but at times, I still feel my body tensing around crowds and unpredictable situations. And although I now have the tools to manage these moments, I wonder if they will ever go away. Just as having cancer has forever changed me, COVID did, too.

I am not the same person I was before March of 2020, and neither are you. Whether we like it or not, we have all been changed by the other big “C.” Our COVID stories matter — whether they be from a first grader who missed their little league season, a teenager who had to do school online from the confines of their bedroom, a frontline worker, a grandparent who went a year without a hug, a once healthy adult who now suffers from long COVID, or one of the millions of people who lost a loved one. These experiences shaped us into the people we are today, they are a part of us now. To say those truths out loud is to know we were never alone, even when we were.

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