How I Kept My Spirits Up While Hospitalized for Cancer

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It’s easy to fall into depression and anxiety during long hospitalizations for cancer, but creativity helped pull me out of those negative feelings.

cartoon image of blogger and AML survivor, Mary Sansone

Dealing with depression or being a caregiver for a depressed patient can be difficult and exhausting. When I visit depressed patients, I want to tell the person the cure: write a gratitude list! Take a walk! Watch an old favorite movie! But then I’d recall my time as a patient and remember that being told what to do was also exhausting, and some practiced suggestions were futile.

Before my second leukemia diagnosis, I went through a severe depression, most likely caused by my intense unhappiness with a new job after flourishing with one company for 20 years. I tried mediation, gratitude lists, exercise and yoga. I remained so depressed that I picked up drinking after 25 years of sobriety. I was let go from my job.

Unbelievably, that worked. I went to treatment and was happier living in a grungy halfway house than I was in a three-story brand-new townhome.

Then I got diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia again. I went into the hospital for a month-long induction regimen, and then later for another month when I received a bone marrow transplant.

Feeling physically ill increased the mental anxiety and creeping depression. But I remembered that depression subsided when I enacted an important change.

So, not only did I accept the time and ears of my doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains and family, I also took it upon myself to do something that frees the mind.

If not for creativity, I might have emotionally suffered to the extent that there would be no fight.

For me, it was painting and writing.

Having never painted as an adult, I became obsessed with water coloring. Contented hours flew by each day.

I also started accumulating “word of the day” definitions. Contented hours flew by.

I started writing little stories using those words. Contented hours flew by.

I thought I would share this silly excerpt:

CHAPTER I:

The Boulevardier was elated to be escorted by the industry auteur to his new premier. Elated fans appreciated the filmmaker’s Daedalian virtu in writing and directing. He was renowned for trenchant scripts that limned difficult emotions with clear dialogue. He wasn’t one for neoplasm. The fans expressed their precatory hope that an Oscar would be bestowed on this industry eidolon.

She was proud to be at his side. The red-carpet praxis was just as she expected: glorified by lights from paparazzi and screams of adulations from enthusiastic fans. Having been a spectator for many previous red carpets, she was apodictic in ceremony protocol. Howbeit, she was still nervous, and her stomach shifted uncomfortably. It didn’t help that the duo just finished dining on an esculent farinaceous feast.

She was worried that her secret would be exposed; she was having an affair with the star of the movie! There couldn’t be a worse time to have her transgressions exposed. After her cartomancy ultimo, she feared that the fortune-telling prediction would be unveiled this evening. And the pictures of them recently osculating were in the wrong hands. This would be humiliating for the filmmaker on such a momentous night.

Her affair- paramour played a tyro science teacher. In the first scene, he was lecturing in a lyceum to eager students about eustasy from melting icebergs. The world needed to wake up: irrefragable climate change could cause massive devastation!Mother earth was not perdurable. The perorating was cut short when a student asked for epexegesis; he wanted to know if syncretism could destroy acedia.

“That will probably never happen to the extent that the suffering earth needs to survive and flourish,” he said – looking straight into the audience.

She felt as though he was scolding her directly.

Eager for chapter two? Maybe not. I know it’s weird.

I then did some drawings of the socialite and painted a picture of an architecturally obscure and colorful theatre.

My time spent exploring creativity was not productive in the conventional sense; I was not checking things off a list, preparing myself for a job, or paying off bills or even attending to physical pains. Instead, it was productive in soothing my mind and experiencing freedom. The paintings would never be hung in a gallery. The writing would never be published (except this funny little excerpt here.) But my brain pleasantly shifted; I dulcified the depression and felt lighter. I got through tough days and eventually recovered. I then found a new path in life where I can be a little more creative in my job.

I’m happy!

Spoiler alert: The socialite tergiversates from the filmmaker. Malheureusement, she is murdered on a glacier by her lover while the auteur captures the moment on film.

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