Ignorance Is Bliss
Cancer has given me incredible abilities to rationalize the irrational. I know this disease can kill me. And even though I've spent more time contemplating my own death in the past two years than I did in the first thirty, I've somehow been able to convince myself that there was something different about the cancer of each person that has passed away while I haven't. The truth is that all these little tricks I've been playing on myself are a lie. Cancer is cancer and it'll kill you.
That harsh reality slapped me in the face last week when someone I knew passed away after her second battle with breast cancer. Leann was diagnosed about a year before I was. She was 38 when she passed away. When I got the email on Friday, it felt like the temperature in the room dropped 30 degrees. I know I just stared at the computer, pale-faced and teary-eyed, until I remembered where I was and pulled it together.
In some ways, learning of her passing was a relief; she was no longer suffering. It's the knowledge of what she went through that is so upsetting. Two years ago I had no real understanding of how cancer could ravage a body. It's something I could have lived my life happily not knowing. But I do now. And I have an active imagination.
So I'll go back to my little mind games, trying to convince myself of nonsensical reasons why my cancer won't come back and kill me while it's doing just that to others.
That harsh reality slapped me in the face last week when someone I knew passed away after her second battle with breast cancer. Leann was diagnosed about a year before I was. She was 38 when she passed away. When I got the email on Friday, it felt like the temperature in the room dropped 30 degrees. I know I just stared at the computer, pale-faced and teary-eyed, until I remembered where I was and pulled it together.
In some ways, learning of her passing was a relief; she was no longer suffering. It's the knowledge of what she went through that is so upsetting. Two years ago I had no real understanding of how cancer could ravage a body. It's something I could have lived my life happily not knowing. But I do now. And I have an active imagination.
So I'll go back to my little mind games, trying to convince myself of nonsensical reasons why my cancer won't come back and kill me while it's doing just that to others.
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