Chapter 5 Resilient Dignity

   How can you maintain dignity with cancer?

   As I was growing up, whenever I was facing a new or challenging situation, my Mother would say to me, "Remember who you are."  I was surprised in my cancer classes at how many mothers had said this same thing to my students: "Remember who you are."  This is good advice as we consider dignity and cancer.

   There are so many things that strip away our personhood with cancer--things we normally associate and identify with ourselves. Parts of our bodies, previously kept private, are openly exposed.  We are conveyed from one impersonal machine to another, sometimes without knowing why.  Our formally sharp mind becomes foggy and confused.  Our level of fatigue seems insurmountable.  We begin to feel like a "thing"--a specimen to be impersonally studied. We long to be acknowledged as a person.  It's time to "Remember who you are."

   Getting relief from your symptoms is a helpful step in restoring dignity but dignity is more.  It includes maintaining a sense of meaning and purpose and a sense of who you are as an individual.

   The type of treatment we receive can have a dramatic impact on our sense of dignity.  No matter what our level of dependency or need, we have a right to be treated with dignity.  Yet the truth is we can't affect how other people treat us.  No one can give us dignity.  It is a product of self-respect, acceptance and self-honoring.

   Questions arise:  AM I still ME? Can I maintain or find the essence of who I once was, in spite of this cancer?

   It is a good time to look back at the tree of ourselves that we created in Chapter 1.  Study your life history.  Pay special attention to the branches containing the fruits of good things you have already accomplished or the good that you have done or has been done through you.  Accomplishments heighten your sense of dignity and self-respect.  Think about what you are most proud of.  In spite of illness the essential component that defines you is still there.  To repeat: Dignity begins with our own self-respect, acceptance and self honoring.  Remember  who you are.

   Have you known a person who maintained a sense of dignity during a cancer ordeal?  In your journal name that person and reflect on his/her characteristics.