Positive thinking got me through cancer scare.
Today’s writing is a tail of positive thinking more than anything else. Not about how positive thinking can change your life or circumstances, but about how it can keep you from letting adversity from effecting you negatively. Over a month ago I went to see my doctor because I had a pain in my arm that had been hurting every time I raised my arm or lifted reasonably light objects one handed. This had been going on for a while. I discussed it with the doctor saying it feels like a muscular problem and he agreed that was probably the case or possibly I’d trapped a nerve. There are tests that he could have done, and offered to do, but felt it would probably clear up in a week or two so I elected to wait. Two weeks passed without change but I had, by this time caught a heavy cold which kept me in for about a week. Add to that when I booked my next doctor’s appointment I had to wait a week to see the same doctor. By this time, while the pain in my arm was the same I had also developed pain across my chest and in my upper back. When I explained this to the doctor it was a game changer. This is where he dropped the C bomb, “there is a very small chance it could be lung cancer” he said. That sounds worse than it was. He wasn’t as brutal as it reads in this blog but he was preparing me for the worse and this is where my positive mental attitude kicked in. Now I’ve had a chest x-ray and blood tests and found out today they all show clear of any illness including cancer so it must, I’m happy to say, be a skeletal problem.
So what did my positive mental attitude do for me? In short it kept me going. I walked out of the doctor’s surgery thinking “I’ll have the tests but it’s not cancer. Even if it is, it’s got a fight on its hands. Cancer is not taking me”. Now, it is easy for someone in this position to go into a slump. Hearing you may have cancer can be hard for some to take. Obviously, hearing you do have cancer would be a lot worse, but just the news you may have makes you think, possibly think negatively. My positive mental attitude would never have cured caner but it meant I continued to live my normal happy life. I didn’t become depressed. If it had turned out I had cancer then this positive attitude would have meant I would have had a greater chance of winning the fight. This doesn’t just apply to cancer but to anything we have to face in life. If you let something get you down everything will seem a lot worse than it really is. Many of our problems seem less of a problem and easier to solve if we maintain a positive attitude. So no matter what life throws at you, your attitude is key to how you cope with life. So no matter how bad you think it is, think positive, it will help.