The treatment terrifies me more than the diagnosis

I was only 5 years old when I had my first big encounter with the medical profession. I always had clear, though fragmented, memories of what happened, but none of how I felt about it. I remember being forcibly restrained for a lifesaving procedure and being isolated for six weeks in a hospital room.

As an adult, I had recurring nightmares and experienced hypervigilance in all medical settings. I never knew why. Then, when I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, all the medical demons from my past came roaring out of my unconscious, where they’d been doing their quiet work for decades. I found that I had lots of emotional memories from my earliest medical encounters. Cancer scared me a lot, but the idea that I was going to …