What Facing Cancer Taught Me About Fear

New York Times

26-04-2025

To say I was afraid of mice is to put it mildly.
I was terrified, not only of how they looked and the way they scuttled along a baseboard but also of what they portended. This began in 2011, when, after months of failing health, I spent a week in a hospital in Paris, where I lived. Doctors ran countless tests but found nothing conclusive.
Eventually, they diagnosed me with burnout and sent me home.
It wasn't a satisfying explanation. I felt better while in the hospital, but that was because of prednisone, an ordinary steroid. As it wore off, I deteriorated again.
For days I lay in bed, growing weaker and feeling a creeping unease. At the same time, I began to hear scurrying in the kitchen. I hadn't cleaned up before my unexpected hospitalization, and I began imagining mice multiplying inside the cabinets.
I asked my boyfriend at the time if he heard anything, but he hadn't. I worried I was losing my grip on reality.
Several days passed, and I was still in bed. My skin was pallid, and lesions covered the inside of my mouth. 'Something's seriously wrong,' my boyfriend said. 'We need to go to the E.R.'
So I dragged myself to the hospital, where tests revealed that my blood counts had plummeted. The doctor recommended I return home to New York immediately. We went back to the apartment, and I packed my suitcase. Afterward, I climbed into bed, terrified and exhausted, yearning for the oblivion of sleep.
Then, the noise began again — and my boyfriend heard it, too. He hurried into the kitchen and threw open the cupboard. I heard a yelp and felt panic. 'Are there mice?' I shouted.
'No, just a bug!' he said unconvincingly.
Next came a series of crashes and bangs, pots clanging and a thwacking sound like a broom hitting the floor. I asked again: 'Tell me the truth. How many?'
He paused. 'More than I can count.'
I suddenly felt invaded, as if my little Parisian studio apartment had been infiltrated by pestilence. I saw the mice as an omen.
I flew home the next morning. A few weeks later, I was diagnosed with leukemia, and fear became my dominant emotion. Fear of needles. Fear of time slipping by. Fear of being a burden. Fear that all my dreams would be dashed. Fear of grief, not only my own but also the grief I might cause the people I love. Fear of pain. Fear of the next biopsy. Fear of death.
These fears made sense to me. But after I emerged from four years of treatment, I found that I was afraid of living — a fear that's much harder to explain.
I had lost so many friends to illness, and I had lost that boyfriend to the toll of it. I feared opening myself up to new love. I was afraid of the future. Afraid any plans I made would be undone by some errant leukemia cell or other calamity. I'd wake up with the best intentions, but I'd end up back under the covers, so overcome by fear that I couldn't function. And when you're in such a spiral, another fear creeps in: that you'll never experience uncomplicated joy again.
After a year of languishing, I managed to shake myself loose when I embarked on a 15,000-mile solo cross-country road trip. It was an extended session of self-styled exposure therapy that began with confronting my fear of driving. I got my license at the ripe old age of 27, loaded up a borrowed Subaru and set off. Over the next hundred days, I faced one fear after another. I met new people and also grew comfortable being alone. I sat with my grief, and I found I could carry what lingered, from lost love to the imprints of illness.
I also analyzed my fears in my journal. Sometimes you're so afraid but you don't know why, which makes the fear seem unparsable and intractable. But in writing your fears down, you can evaluate them — to see which are valid and which have no grounding in fact.
The more clearly I saw my fears, the more I noticed a strange irony: I feared what I wanted most. If you've had your stability ripped away, it can feel dangerous to have hope or to take risks. But my fear was not protecting me from harm, only preventing me from attaining what I wanted: to be independent, to feel strong, to write again, to dream big dreams, to fall in love, to live daringly.
Once I knew this, I got to choose. I could brace myself against discomfort, or I could be open to it all. It was like building a muscle: often uncomfortable, sometimes painful, always exhausting. But I became stronger, and I began seeing the rewards. I realized that the more I ran from my fear, the bigger it loomed. Yet if I confronted the fear, it lost its power. As the fear evaporated, other feelings materialized, like wonder and curiosity. And as my friend Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer, once said to me, 'You don't have to be particularly brave. You just have to be a tiny bit more interested in something than you are frightened' — one percent more curious than afraid.
Now to return to the omens. In the years after I finished treatment, my fear of mice persisted. Mice seemed to show up wherever I went.
The year before my road trip, I had a mouse in my apartment. I was petrified of it, as was Oscar, my feisty terrier mutt (who had once chased down a bear in Vermont woods). I knew the mouse had made an appearance when I'd find Oscar trembling in a corner.
Years later, I moved to an old farmhouse in the Delaware River Valley. And what do you know? Lovely bucolic hamlets also have mice. Each time I saw one, I called my neighbor Jody to help me get rid of it. I couldn't even look at the mice. That old superstition held sway.
And then my greatest fear came to pass. In 2021, I learned that after a decade of remission, the leukemia was back. To relapse after that long is extremely rare, and my prognosis was not good. I thought, 'I might die this time,' and that felt frightening. But I had done a lot of work to figure out who I was, what I wanted and even how I would do things differently if I got sick again.
During a second bone-marrow transplant, rather than feeling frozen by fear, I invoked a creative practice to defang it. Medication temporarily impaired my vision, so I journaled in voice memos and watercolors. When my husband, Jon, and I had to be apart, we stayed connected through the lullabies he composed for me daily. And when I grew so weak that I needed a walker, I bedazzled every inch of its drab frame with colorful rhinestones. Afterward, instead of pity, Li'l Dazzy and I were met with delight and, incredibly, a passing shout of 'Cool walker!'
I survived that transplant, but I will never be considered cured. I'll be in treatment indefinitely, and it can feel as if the sword of Damocles is hanging over me. But giving fear free rein makes it hard to live. You're afraid of rebuilding, because what you create may collapse — but then you just exist in wreckage. And the truth is, sometimes fear makes it hard to see when things are good.
When I returned home months after my transplant, I opened my closet and saw something shadowy and rodent-shaped on the floor. I slammed the door and called Jody, who came over to investigate. Afterward, he came downstairs and said I had a serious problem on my hands. I felt seized with panic and asked if I needed to call an exterminator.
'No,' he said. 'A shrink.' It wasn't a mouse; it was a pouch of patchouli.
I began working on my fear of mice in clinician-directed exposure therapy. And it worked. I no longer see mice as harbingers of doom. I understand that they're a fact of life, in the city or the country. And while I would still prefer to have Jody — whom I call 'Angel Man' for all the miraculous ways he comes to my aid — remove the occasional mouse, I don't feel I need to move out every time I see one. If mice were to return, I could deal with it.
That's what I found on the other side of fear: the knowledge that I can handle it, whatever 'it' is — as long as I'm one percent more curious than afraid.