How Surviving Cancer Can be Like a Journey Through Hell (AND BACK)

Congratulations! After a long journey, you survived cancer!!!

Battling cancer is often likened to going through hell.

This is an incredibly accurate analogy. I know it. You know it. We all know it.

Getting diagnosed with cancer is like entering into the first circle of hell from Dante’s Inferno. But Dante was wrong about the relative peace of the first circle. 

When you enter this outermost level, you take in your surroundings. It is exactly as terrible as everyone ever imagined it to be. It is (literally) a god-forsaken place that seeps the hope from your very soul. Even this outer level of hell invokes unimaginable horror.

Ruin and desolation in its purest form surround you. It is a place no living human should ever be found. The very environment is one designed to elicit pain and suffering of every imaginable sense.

You notice all these things within the first ten seconds of your arrival and think:

“By God, this is terrible! There is no way I am staying here!”

The good news is you won’t be staying there in that first circle of hell! The bad news is that you are going to be going further in.

Yes, you heard me.

The moment you begin chemotherapy, you are unwillingly embarking on a journey to save yourself from cancer, and it is as if your next life-saving dose of chemo is always located within a deeper level of hell.

Regardless of what you feel, you are inevitably forced to make a beeline straight into the depths of a (literally) god-forsaken place.

And while Dante may have underestimated how terrible the outermost circles of hell were, he did get something else right:

The deeper into hell you go, the worse it gets. 

You trudge onward as every moment of your journey takes a deeper physical and emotional toll. You can’t see the end; an endless expanse of terrain lays before you each day. 

You walk a predetermined path and are helpless to do anything but follow it. 

The further you descend into hell’s depths, the greater the horrors become.

Demons along the way torment and torture you; They do everything in their power to overwhelm you and make you succumb. The obstacles you encounter do everything in their power to break your mind, body, and very soul.

Some of these trials leave you with scars, others gift you with festering wounds.

Your mind is quickly trained to expect trauma and constantly remains in a state of panic and fear.

This is pure survival. It takes everything in you to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

You traverse the bones of those who have come before you; those whose bodies were not strong enough to endure the physical strain of their journey; those whose spirits were crushed by demons that were too powerful to overcome.

You carry on, growing weaker and weaker.

Your journey seems never-ending, and the days are numberless.

Now, you want to rest. Your journey has been long and arduous. You are no longer dying from cancer.

This knowledge makes you feel better than you have for a long time. In this situation, relief can be deceiving. You can feel so relieved that you forget where you are.

This is where many people stop. They believe that their journey ends here. They think they journeyed through hell and they have come out on the other side.  (You can’t blame them; they are exhausted and delirious from all their suffering).

What they don’t understand, but what they will soon come to learn, is this: They did not travel through hell, but into hell.

They descended into Dante’s 9th circle of hell, and that is where they stand at the end of their treatment. These survivors may not be dying from cancer, but they have undergone a tormenting journey that inevitably left them a physical and emotional mess. Their travels accustomed them to living with horrible battle wounds and extensive emotional torment

Even if they don’t realize it or are too tired to care, these survivors are just a shade of the whole, healthy human being they were at the start of their journey.

And they are standing in an environment that continues to pose threats to their wellbeing and life. 

New cancer survivors stand in this place of death and destruction; a place where suffering emanates all around them and nothing good can be felt.

When you are in this place, you may have survived cancer, but death and despair surround you on every side.

There is no escape from suffering here.

YOU CAN’T STAY WHERE YOU ARE.

After my chemotherapy ended, I stayed right in the center of hell for the longest time.

I took that final dose of chemo and looked at all the desolation around me. This realm of suffering had become my new normal. I had actually forgotten that there was such a thing as sunlight. I was used to the suffocating darkness of hell.

I didn’t even know how much cancer had ruined me. I was so used to feeling despair, depressed, anxious, and like the world around me emanated pain.

For a long time, I really believed that was normal. It was like I was living in the movie Inception, where those who remained in a dream world for too long could forget what reality actually was. 

I didn’t even realize that I was standing in the middle of hell.

SO I STAYED PUT.

I moved to scrape together threadbare materials and constructed a meager shelter for myself. Then, I lay on the ground, curled up in a ball, and closed my eyes, trying to block out the horror of everything around me.

I did this for over a year.

Eventually, I realized where I was. Something intangible reminded me that there was another place called “the world of the living”—a place where there was sunlight, peace, and things that made people smile. 

I desperately wanted to get to that place.

But I STILL didn’t move because I had a new problem.

Even when I knew I was in hell, I stayed there for an indefinite period of time for one simple reason:

I didn’t know how to find my way out.

The only path that I knew was one with demons and obstacles that I had no desire of reencountering.

But one day I opened my eyes and saw my true reality. I took stock of the unhealed, painful, bloody wounds that peppered my body. I felt the emotional torment and anguish roiling beneath the surface of my consciousness.

And I remembered something:

Hell is not a place where living human beings can stay.

This caused me a LOT of psychological conflict.

I was terrified of retracing my steps and facing old horrors again. I was an abused animal, broken in every sense. I felt like I had no strength left in me to move. I knew those facts with absolute certainty.

But I also knew three other things:

1)    My days (sitting huddled in the center of hell with my demons pressing in on all sides) were numbered.

2)    I had been through too much to not at least try to reach my true, final destination.

3)    If I didn’t try, then I would live and die a life that had only been suffering.

This was a huge epiphany moment for me. 

Once these thoughts took hold…

I continued to stay frozen where I was for a while longer. I was inspired but too terrified to move. (Don’t judge, it had been a long freaking journey on the way in). It took a bit of time to muster up the courage and convince myself that I had the strength.

But then I made my move.

In a dead-out sprint (or as fast as an exhausted, near-fatally wounded ex-chemo patient can run), I burst from my pathetic excuse of a shelter and made a beeline right back down the path I came from.

This time, I was not running just to save my own life, I was running to save my soul and my chance at happiness. 

And my god, this run out of hell made a marathon seem like an easy warmup.

This was another round of torture. There were times when I stumbled to the ground and almost chose not to stand again—times when I was almost certain that I had nothing left in me to keep going.

But I discovered new strength, for on this second journey through hell, I had an advantage for one reason:

I knew exactly what to expect.

(I was an experienced traveler, you could say)

My familiarity with the terrain I traveled allowed me to mentally equip myself to face every obstacle in my path.

I faced my demons head-on, eyes open, fully aware. I knew where they would strike and how it would feel. I could brace myself for each mental and physical blow.

During these second encounters, I became intimately acquainted with these tormenters (think the “first-name” basis). I learned how to block and deflect their blows until these demons could no longer touch me.

THEN I BEGAN TO FIGHT BACK.

Each demon had a unique fighting style that I had to learn.

THIS WAS A LONG PROCESS.

I was not the Karate kid. I was a beaten, bloody, 5’2” girl who had barely escaped death on a battlefield.

But I battled these demons until, one by one, I defeated them.

It was an agonizing process, but on my journey back to life, I was not only a victim. This time, I was also conqueror of all the hellish things that had ever caused me pain.

As I ascended from hell’s depths, as I pushed onward, my wounds slowly began to heal.

And when I finally came to stand at the gate between hell and the world of the living, I found that many of my wounds had faded to scars— I realized all my conquered demons would only ever haunt me in memory.

Traversing through the desolation of hell and back had instilled me with great strength of will and deep wisdom unparalleled by my former self. As I survived, I grew in ways I never foresaw.

Yet, as I evaluated the total state of my body, mind, and spirit, I also understood there were some damages that would never fully be undone. My journeys had taken their toll.

I distantly sensed that I would face new trials in the future.

But, in that moment, I wasn’t fazed. I could only see what was directly before me.

I sank to the ground, having nothing left in me to give. But I didn’t need to take even one more step.

I had finally reached my true destination.

For there at the mouth of hell, for the first time in years, I could feel the warmth of life-giving sunlight on my skin.

Somewhere deep within me, my long-quieted heart stirred.

I knew that this was the moment I had truly beaten cancer.

And it was the beginning of a new journey, a journey into the light.

Now that we have gone through my “surviving cancer is like going through hell” analogy, allow me to list out a few things I encountered on my own journey out of hell after my chemotherapy ended: Anxiety, PTSD, depression, anorexia, my own unhealthy victim mentality, control issues, new fears, and (just a small thing) I hated being alive.

For the longest time, I didn’t want to admit that cancer messed me up. I couldn’t even admit this to myself, let alone the rest of the world. But I eventually had to.

I had to accept that I was a mess and choose to face all of these things. I had to learn where I was falling short and be better than I was.

Even though it was not my fault that I had physical, mental, and emotional trauma, it was still my responsibility to overcome the things I had control over and learn to cope (in healthy ways) with the things I couldn’t change.

I owed this to myself, my future well-being, and the people who cared about me.  And deciding to make the return journey through hell and face all my own demons has been worth it.

Why?

That journey gave me the opportunity to really heal and recover from my experiences with cancer, to become the best version of myself, and to feel truly alive again. Until I made my return journey, I wasn’t able to feel any sense of peace or happiness.

Fully recovering after chemotherapy is a long process. It’s a difficult return journey. But it is worth it in the end. Trust me.

So when you reach the end of your chemotherapy, make that choice. Choose to turn around from where you stand in the center of hell. Summon up the strength you don’t know that you have. Choose to retrace your steps and confront and conquer all the demons you faced on the way there.

Don’t accept where you are. Make it back to where you can be in the light.

You deserve that.