Blog Entry #2 by Marilyn Herasymowych

Marilyn Herasymowych

At 1:00 pm, March 17, 2009, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  At 4:00 pm that afternoon, I was admitted into the hospital because I had a lot of trouble breathing.  There I was, sitting on a bed in emergency, Henry holding my hand, waiting to meet the oncologist.  I remember feeling like a little girl, going to her first day of school.  It was surreal.  I had a paradoxical feeling of both anxiety about the cancer diagnosis and curiosity about being admitted into a hospital.  Henry was very calm, and I was a chatterbox, talking about what we had just heard and what this might mean.  We had just sold our house and we needed to move, and here I was being admitted into the hospital in a city that was two and half hours away from where we lived.  Henry smiled, and said, “I guess we better start planning for limits.”  We both laughed.

Henry and I had no idea how important “planning for limits” would become to helping us to deal with the most profound uncertainty of our life – being diagnosed with cancer.  This would become even more critical as we went through cancer treatments, and dealt with the aftermath of viscous side effects, and the agonizing change in our life that would become our new normal.

We had spent the last 20 years in MHA Institute creating a learning system to help people in organizations to think and act more effectively in highly uncertain situations.  Part of this learning system uses a language and patterns of behaviour to describe what people are experiencing.  Another part of the learning system provides pathways through the difficulties, in order to create new patterns of behaviour that are beneficial to both people within organizations and the organizational goals.  This learning system works because it gives people a way of thinking about uncertainty that makes it easier to act, rather than to react to the difficulties that uncertainty unleashes.

When Henry said “I guess we better start planning for limits,” he was using the language of this learning system we had created.  We were dealing with a pattern of behaviour called limits to success, and the pathway through limits to success is called plan for limits.  When Henry referred to planning for limits, he refocused our thinking so that we could quickly identify our limits and start dealing with them effectively, thus reducing the anxiety that uncertainty creates.  Doing this helped us to feel more in control, and more able to take in information about what was happening and what choices we might have to make.

Plan for limits provides a number of strategies to consider when dealing with limits to success – the one that was most relevant to us at this time was to identify current limits.  While we waited in Emergency for the doctor to arrive, we started talking about our current limits and what we had to do to deal with them.   The first limit that we faced was that I was in a hospital in Lethbridge, and we lived in Calgary, two and half hours away.  The second was to reschedule our work with clients, so that Henry could deal with emerging issues from this diagnosis and my stay in the hospital.  The third was that we had just sold our house, and we had less than 60 days to find a new place to live, then pack and move.  We had to deal with the first two limits right away.  The third limit would have to wait until tomorrow.

Note: If you’d like to know more about Marilyn’s cancer journey, check out her blog at www.cancerbrokeallmypencils.com.