"You aren't going to have the year you thought you'd have.".

That's what a nurse told my wife and me after my wife was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer.

I was reminded of our year of cancer when the pandemic was declared.

Like many people around the world, I thought, well, there's an outbreak in China but it won't happen to us.

Because of the pandemic, we're not going to have the year we thought we'd have.

We can't do all the things we want to do until this pandemic is under control — just as my wife and I hoped that surgery, chemotherapy and radiation would leave her with "no evidence of disease," as they say in cancer world.

I once interviewed surgeon Sherwin Nuland, author of How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, and asked him about the stresses and uncertainties of the year of treatment.

For some cancer patients, it's not a year — it's a lifetime.

Then there's the unpredictability of disease to deal with — whether cancer or the novel coronavirus.

"The challenge with breast cancer — and with the virus — is that the finish line keeps getting moved," says Bantug, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 23 and had a recurrence two years later.

Now 38, she counsels breast cancer survivors at Johns Hopkins' Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

It's more like you're reclaiming a little bit of old normal pleasure and, for a while, not thinking about cancer (or the pandemic).

So in 2020, just as we did during our year of cancer, we look for ways to escape pandemic anxiety.

Marc Silver is the editor of NPR's Goats and Soda blog and author of Breast Cancer Husband: How to Help Your Wife (and Yourself) Through Diagnosis, Treatment and Beyond