Nancy Koehn never thought she would get cancer, and she sure as hell never thought she would get it twice.
Her second diagnosis came over the phone. She was sitting in her office at the Harvard Business School, preparing to teach a class on the leadership of Ernest Shackleton, when the call came. "You have cancer, much to our surprise," the doctor said. She canceled the class, the first time she had ever done so in her life.
"The floor fell out from under me emotionally," she said.
Fighting cancer, Koehn said, involves accepting the fact that a lot of your experience with the disease will be out of your control. "Cancer is like mercury," she explained. "You drop it on the desk, and you don't quite know. You can try to collect it, but it's going to go the way it's going to go."
But what you can control, Koehn said, makes all the difference. "You can't choose how the treatment affects you, you can't choose what happens to the cells, you can't choose what the path report is," she said. "You can choose what internal operating system you're going to try to default to."
That internal operating system is what Koehn refers to as the "mental game" of cancer. After her second diagnosis, she was prepared to beat that mental game, armed with the wisdom of friends who had fought the disease before and won. Whenever she found herself lying on her bathroom floor sick with excruciating, never-ending nausea after a chemotherapy treatment, she imagined herself post-illness, jumping her horse in Florida. When she felt alone, she pictured the scores of men, women, and children battling the disease across the country. She surrounded herself with people eager to hug her and hold her hair back and give injections and be there, even during the lowest, scariest parts of her illness.
Winning the mental game not only helped Koehn get through the cancer, but it also helped her decide how the experience would define her once she got better. "I wanted to get something good and gold and glistening out of my pathetic, nauseated, weak, bald self," she explained.
What she got, she said, was a new attention to the "luminous moments": anything from walking the dog in the morning to the smile and wink of the woman behind a restaurant's take-out counter when handing her an order, anything that reminds her she is grateful to be alive.
"Every day is rife with poetry," she said. "And I've learned to see it now."
To hear more from Harvard historian Nancy Koehn, tune in to the full interview on Boston Public Radio above. Read her two-part series on beating cancer in The Huffington Post here and here.
