A note about cancer and holidays: If you have friends or family who have cancer or had cancer, make sure you treat them extra special. Even those who are done with treatment struggle a lot with energy levels. They may not have the energy to stand in lines at the mall or gift wrap everything nicely. Their gifts might be late or they may resort to just buying gift cards. When cancer strikes , holidays can feel like a burden. If you want to buy them gifts, do consider their situation. Service gifts are excellent like cleaning service gifts, gift certificates to restaurants or their favorite pizza place, hair salon etc. Sometimes, when struggling with energy its hard to deal with handling gifts at all.
Offer to take them out for lunch or breakfast. Offer a day of friendship. Not all gifts are sold at the mall.
Help out with their home, or tree clean up after the holidays.
With cancer, its the gift of time that is most valuable.
Not all cancer patients need cookies and chocolates. A lot of women struggle with weight during cancer treatments. A tower of chocolates or cookies may be the last straw. If in doubt, ask the recipient if there is something they would really like.
If you have them over, be considerate of what they may or may not be able to eat. Again ask if they are having any side effects or food that they can no longer tolerate.
A little consideration and caring goes a long way in strengthening loving relationships.
Many cancer survivors deal with sadness and depression around holidays and fears about the next year. Be patient with them. They may not be feeling the holiday cheer. Don’t push them to feel happy either neither guilt them to feel grateful. Allow them the space to grieve if they need to.
Dealing with Cancer around holidays is complex and exhausting.
All they need is to know that you care and gifts aren’t the only way to show that.
Have a very blessed holiday season.
Uzma Yunus

I have often through my career as a psychiatrist remarked to my patients, “You need to work on conserving your emotional energy”. Too often, I have heard from patients, I am overwhelmed and tired and can’t think straight anymore!”

While depression and anxiety can become psychiatric disorders needing professional treatment, being overwhelmed is usually something that requires active management of life circumstances.
We either take too much on, don’t get enough rest or down time or are holding on to long term unresolved emotional issues. We currently are a nation of overwhelmed folks, one crisis away from a complete breakdown( if it hasn’t already occurred) . And it is because we have cumulatively exhausted our emotional energy.

Now let me explain what I mean by emotional energy. Emotional energy is the energy that controls the ability of a person to connect with their own feeling without it being clouded by extraneous factors. This is the force that assists us in coping with difficulties and understanding and processing meaningful emotions. We all have a reserve of emotional energy. It is the emotional energy or lack there of,  that in turn impacts our mood and subsequently our behavior.

 Presence of emotional energy is like a soft cushion that absorbs the jarring and daily falls in life and therefore we bounce back.

As we take on more and more and spend less time in self care, this cushion thins out, the less the thickness, the lesser the ability to bounce back and more hurt we feel when we fall. After going through the election season, we are all falling on thinned out cushions. Is there any surprise that our joints hurt and we are short and angry?

We are literally the sum of positive and negative energies driven by emotions. Happiness, contentment and peace add significantly to the reserve of our positive energy while anger, lack of satisfaction and sadness are extremely draining to the reservoir of emotional energy. Even though we have no control over external factors that control our lives, we retain the ability to manage our emotional responses to these agents. A lot of people find refuge in externalizing the blame and finding the person at “fault” to deal with their angry emotions and make an effort to focus the anger on the said party. It may make us feel a little better for a short period of time but it is unable to bring us to a resolution emotionally because that situation and its residual emotions still persist.

Once angry without resolution, we behave like loaded guns responding to any minor provocation as if it were a major crisis. Most people experience unresolved anger as persistent low grade irritability and get annoyed easily. Again the issue is that anger very quickly depletes emotional energy and then we are fall hard and fall painfully.

Disappointment is another very hard emotion to cope with. Disappointment usually comes with a mixture of anger and sadness. It may be a situation or an expectation that did not turn out as we had hoped. This often leads to us generalizing our anger or disappointment on to other situations and instances and an expectation that things will get worse. This apprehension feeds the cycle of fear and anxiety, another duo of emotions that then lead to loss of emotional energy.

In this very interconnected and immediate world of ours, we don’t have space for ourselves. Our minds are flooded with bytes of information that may or may not be relevant to our lives. Our shortened attention spans get in the way of properly processing our own thoughts because someone just wrote an article about exactly how we “should” be feeling after this election.

It is prudent though that we connect with our own feeling about an issue and understand them fully. We cannot do that unless we replenish our emotional energies.

Last weekend, I took a step back from Facebook myself. There was intense affect everywhere. A whirling storm of anger, insults and disagreements and posts about hate crime were flooding in. I do care very deeply about the political direction this election took and now the country will take but at the same time reality of my own life remains vivid. I live in a world of incurable cancer and perpetual treatment with grave uncertainty. Getting through each day is an exercise in positivity.

So Friday I logged off of Facebook . I decided I would not post any statuses for a whole week neither would I comment on anyone else’s . It has been two days. I have removed myself from the duel between the supporters of the two candidates rather I put myself squarely in the middle of my own life. I took a step back to rehabilitate myself emotionally. Being on social media and disclosing aspects of your own life always comes at the cost of vulnerability. Opening yourself to affect of others which is constantly with you can be exhausting. My face book feed was a combination of grief and gloating, of anger and insults, of rational people losing their sanity over petty things and catastrophizing over situations . I asked myself, “Do I need to expose myself to this?”

I love being able to connect with people. I have grown so much by being able to reach and connect with breast cancer survivors all over the world. I have had such opportunity to have dialogues with people about their most intimate thoughts and fears and the honor to help them and sustain them. Social media is an amazing medium. But its toll on emotional energy can be very hard.

With a surgery looming in front of me, a long overdue elective procedure for removal of my ovaries,  I needed to work towards filling up my emotional energy reserve. I have many friends who fill me up with happiness on social media however after the elections, the virtual world was adding to stress, negativity and apprehension, none of those that I need in my life riddled with cancer and its accompanying uncertainty.

Friday evening I sat and chatted for a while with my mother-in-law while my daughter ran her “bakery”. Saturday we had a meal with conversations that had nothing to do with elections and then watch a live show. Sunday was full of errands and chores. Pretty normal weekend activities but the extraneous windows open in my mind were closed. I wasn’t peeking and neither was anyone else. I did have a strange sense of privacy and it felt good. I laughed at my kid’s jokes and not on Obama and Biden memes. And that was alright. Social media is an important part of my life and activism and will remain as such. But I do think it’s great to take a break every now and then.

I hope to return actively on Facebook after my surgery but I wanted to say, that I am glad I am taking this break and I don’t believe that people as wonderful as Americans, are a nation full of racist, bigots and sexist. I will hold on to hope and optimism as long as I can. I hope you can too and I hope that we can all stand together as one to support each other irrespective of color, religion, race or nationality. I hope.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57f18712e4b07f20daa10e51

A family is outside, wishing their fourth grader bye as he gets on the school bus. It’s a crisp Midwest morning, the sun is shining and everything is rich in color and drenched in sunshine. The parents look tired and a little out of sorts while the kids have their backpacks and wonder in their eyes.

The crossing guard has arrived at this spot and parents are relieved to see the same guy from last year. A cheerful and chatty man who waves at everyone with lots of heart.

There is lunch in the backpack and carrots with the ranch dip. There are random conversations about weather and school that have nothing but superficial value.

There is transition and amazement in this day today.

The first day of school.

Families are expecting a return to the routine. The pools will close soon. Activities will start. Classes will begin.

As the bus pulls over, kids line up and there is sudden commotion. Goodbyes and hugs ensue. As kids get on the bus, it slowly drives away.

All moms get back home to finish their coffee and get settled.

One mom sobs profoundly. She cries and she wails in pain. Her husband holds her for as long as she cries. She wants her pain to turn into tears and leave her so she can also finish her coffee and pretend that it’s alright. She is successful in doing that most of the time. But today, she couldn’t.

She is unsure how many of these days she will have.

I don’t know either.

As they say, “Make memories”. I made some more today.

And stay hopeful that there will be another first day of school for this mom.

I have written a lot about cancer, treatments and the trauma that one has to deal with. But today I write about the Almighty “flu” … not real influenza but the routine upper respiratory infection. It’s an experience that is common to all of us and it is a miserable experience. We all know the sore throat, cold, aching sinuses and hacking cough. This may or may not be accompanied by a fever.

If cancer is the emperor of all maladies, upper respiratory infections are the queen. They make the feeling of misery very common. Everyone has experienced it at one point or the other. Queen grants much more appearances than the emperor does. I have met both.

It follows a typical pattern. You are having a good day and suddenly you just don’t feel so well. It’s hard to articulate what isn’t right but a feeling that you would love to lie down and rest. You don’t appear sick but internally feel that something is a bit off. Few hours later the throat feels like someone grabbed a sand paper and rubbed it nice. Pretty soon the eyes feel like they are a wee bit dry with a little burning feeling in them. And soon enough, all mucosal linings of the head and neck engage in a rebellion synchronized  where they are either secreting stuff or dry as heck . Gradually the burning feeling takes over and oops, there is the fever. Now the entire body is aching and you are sick. It feels like the end of the world but it’s really not and you know it but it certainly feels like there is no point carrying on. I get very depressed with colds. I find it funny that I run around with stage 4 cancer while on treatment or that I worked through my chemotherapies but a cold and 100.4 fever is what gets me miserably laid up.

And because of the cold the nasal septum hurts and feels sore. I can’t stand when the sinuses hurt. It’s a dull malicious pain in the forehead and the bones in the cheek as if your face is pressed into a hard surface. This package of misery at its peak usually lasts 1-2 days and you get surrounded by advice to drink lemon ginger tea and chicken soup. Amazingly hot liquids do help so much, so does a hot shower and a little TLC from the family.

And then you cough, a nasty hacking cough reminiscent of someone at the sanatorium. And with the cough, you feel your brain move and the sinuses that feel full get jostled and the head hurts some more.

And then slowly things get better. Albeit some of us, transition to a bacterial infection and need antibiotics.

We live in this world with many micro organisms and URIs are a gentle reminder that we share this space with others and must be respectful of those we co exist with. We are reminded the facts that size does not matter, the fact that life comes with interruptions and recovery. Its pause and go.

Pause for me. Cancer is treating me nicely for now, recent scan showed everything looked stable. But a little virus has gotten me to my knees.

But then, of course if I can get through 16 cycles of chemotherapy, I sure can get through this.

Here is to Chicken noodle soup and to friends who feel like such on hard days.

I have not written much lately. It may be a sign of my avoidance. Sometimes, writing and talking about cancer is also exhausting. Sometimes, it feels like reliving it and too much of a preoccupation. Cancer has weaved itself into my being and unwilling to abandon me much like the love and support of my friends and family.

And life is a complete package of good and the bad. I work on accepting both simultaneously as I hold on to some and let go of some.
I have been busy with the rest of my life. My family, kids and the new found freedom of not having patients to care for. I miss being a doctor very much but I also realize that being a doctor is not confined to the office. Healing is a 24/7 profession that is also incorporated in me as a person. I just don’t get paid in money for it but lots in kindness and gratitude which are the biggest gifts of all.

Recently I have been running into my patients too often on my trips to restaurants and store and wonder if it’s a sign for me to know that they are okay. We often think of ourselves as irreplaceable as people but time and time again, I have seen and experienced that we are all dispensable. I am too. Perhaps not for my kids and husband but generally, life will go on without me.

It’s a comforting thought…knowing that life will keep moving forward.

It always does. Just as those who left us after the shooting in Orlando. Heartbroken as I am, I also know that no matter how big the grief or loss is, we have no choice but to find our inner strength and keep marching and keep pace with this thing that we are trapped in, the perpetual march of life.

Tomorrows can only be better if todays are valued. With incurable cancer, today is what I have.
And today is what life offers you as well.

We all want a better future, devoid of hatred and bigotry. I do too. I may not be around to see what I plant today, to see it grow and thrive to maturity.

Not working for a better future is the loss of ultimate hope.

Life expects all of us to be hopeful. I am too, in so many different ways.

I wish peace to all as we deal with a national tragedy.

I stand by all oppressed and distressed in this moment of grief.

But I remain hopeful. I remain grateful.

Today I tell my daughter to be fierce, to be who she wants to be, to grow wings, to fly, to refuse limits that others try to put on her, be herself , not mold to what others expect but get others used to what she is capable of.
Live large my little girl.
You are a whole person and being. You weren’t born to follow, you were born to lead. You can do anything you want. Remember that!

They will tell you ” girls don’t do that” , you show them.

Let all those dont’s fuel your strength and aspirations.

Tell them your mom was her own person. She broke the ceilings and walls. Tell them you will do the same.

The world needs strong women. Ready to take on, ready to be proud of being women, ready to be fierce.

Lead the way, my girl, lead the way!

Your path may have obstacles but there is always a way around it.

Your gender is part of who you are not what you are.

Be a girl, Be a mighty girl, Be fierce!

Always!

Love, Mom