I have been pondering this very odd thing.
When you have CANCER - and it is all caps, like that - it becomes your reality, yes, but more than that - it becomes your world. Everything in your life is colored by it. EVERYTHING.
It is not that you want to embrace it, because you would really like to do nothing more than get as far away from it as is possible. Tough - it is going to suck to be you for a while, there is no getting away from it. Now for some people, that "while" is not very long a time and not terribly difficult a time. Others among us, however - "us" being that so special club that no one wants to be in - have a longer, harder and just awful time of it.
What is strange to me as a woman who is very pleased to consider that I have kicked cancer to the curb, is that regardless of my being where I am on my road to recovery I am still swimming with that current that says "careful now - cancer is just there, within reach."
Because it is, you know. Breast cancer loves to go to skin, lungs, eyes, and bones. This doesn't mean it WILL metastasize there or anywhere. Having been diagnosed as stage 3A does increase the likelihood, however, and no matter how much you don't want to even think about that, you cannot help BUT think about that. It is part of who you are now. Cancer..
So you do what you can to improve your chances. Eat right, lose weight, exercise, stay up with all of your exams, have your eyes checked annually instead of every 2 years, monitor your own body for any weird thing that could happen, read up on advances, discoveries, new protocols about the drugs you have to take, etc., etc.
You know, nonetheless, that all of these things might be for naught. You might not ever so much as have a hiccup in your health again,or you could find yourself right back at the battle's edge again. You could have prime rib, ice cream sundaes, and pecan pie for every meal or never, ever touch them again and it is still a roll of the dice that you just have to accept.
Then there is the whole thing where you KNOW you have had cancer, your entire world was engulfed in the battle and now down the road someone asks as innocuous a question as "Oh, did you hurt your arm?" when they see your compression sleeve and your brain runs through this whole litany of "I know they knew I had cancer; what? This is someone I've just met and they have no idea I had cancer! How much do I tell them - since it really is none of their business anyway, How polite do I have to be Do I have to be polite at all (notice puctuation in your internal litany disappears entirely) How long has it been since I have seen this person How could THIS person have forgotten all that I have told them before Why is this battle even raging in my head How do I make light of it when I hate this doggone thing How do I make it seem relatively unimportant How do I fling off this feeling of intrusion on my personal buffer How do I let this person know How do I keep this person out of my feelings Why do my doggone feelings jump up and invade my calm Shut up Melanie and say something and the chips may fall where they fall."
You don't want to make someone else uncomfortable and yet how is that your issue? Because I really have to tell you, while I was very much socialized to be nice, polite, kind, compassionate, etc., this trip down cancer's ugly road has shown me I don't really have time to be those things. I won't go out of my way to be ugly and I am, in part, nice, polite, kind, compassionate. I need to be those things TO and FOR me, though. First, for me. Then comes the rest of the world.
Please note that unbeknownst to me, this entry has been sitting in my draft file for YEARS now. It remains valid and so I now choose to post it.
