I might have a slightly off center viewpoint on this but, when it was discovered that I had breast cancer (an inordinately huge surprise since there's no cancer in my family) my first thought was that I didn't want to die. I'm a fairly logical person and the next thought was, "Well, hey, wait not dying is not an option at all because, whether I have cancer or not, I will die" so I then shifted my thinking to "I don't want to suffer." And that seemed easier to deal with because a lot of suffering is avoidable. I spent several months falling into the rabbit hole of Google Scholar and reading hundreds of articles on breast cancer and the treatments and the treatment side effects and the complications and the statistics and everything I could find it to try to prepare myself for making the best decisions for me.

And then I got bored with being in when I called Cancerworld and decided to kind of forget about it and get back to my non-cancer life. I likely have a fairly low risk of recurrence, but then I thought I had a zero risk of cancer and was wrong there so who knows?

I don't know if this makes any sense but I feel that we all live with risks of all these things including cancer on a daily basis, whether we've had cancer before or not, so the best protocol for me was to make the best treatment decisions that I could, based on my own personal values, be realistic about mortality and then just forget about the whole thing and go back to living my life.

I would suggest making a long-term goals because long-term goals usually inherently include shorter and intermediate sub-term goals built into the process. The distance you travel is less important in some ways then the direction you travel so you would still be fulfilling objectives and finding joy along the way.

That seems to me one of the best possible uses of a life worth living and would likely also nourish any strength or discipline that you might need to face any other challenges. I'm having fun getting back to my decision at age 14 to become fluent in foreign language of my choice. It has then many decades since I was 14 and, oddly enough it's still fun to learn a new language and to learn how to think in different metaphors. So I would be on the team of Go For It.

You're no less mortal today, having had this experience, then you were before it. It's just more immediate therefore catching your attention, if that makes any sense. So I would suggest being prepared to deal with whatever you have might have to deal with, but NOT until and unless you have to deal with it, but, otherwise just living the life that you want to live.

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