You won't give up

A few days after my recurrence was diagnosed, I woke up one morning to a voice saying: "You won't give up. You've been through so much already."

My first impression was that it was my mom talking to me – nevermind that she was in Europe at the time and I hadn't yet told my family about the return of cancer. But it wasn't exactly her voice and I had a sense that it was someone else speaking, and not necessarily somebody that I knew very well.

Of course being the moment between sleep and wakefulness I can attribute the message to a dream. And I'm not very spiritual so it's hard for me to say that it could be supernatural. But it's also hard for me to believe that that particular message came from my own mind.

In particular, the message wasn't "Don't give up" or "You'll be fine". It was "You won't give up", which is something I wasn't very confident about. It's taken a tremendous amount of effort to get through four years of treatment, and I'm not as young, naive, and cheerful as I was at the beginning. I have been hopeful, but this recurrence and return to treatment has come sooner and harder than I was ready for.

So I'm not sure that everything is going to be fine. And I'm not confident that I have a plan ready to get through another round of chemotherapy and radiation. But it is somehow reassuring (as well as exhausting) to be told that I still have a fight left in me.