No Points for Style or Difficulty
This week my best friend will watch her mom start chemo. And while I don't know how hard it is to watch, I know how hard it is to do. In trying to prepare her for what her mom is about to go through, I've given her all of the details I thinks she needs to know. I've left some out; there are some you definitely don't need to know about ahead of time because the imagining can be almost as bad as the real thing. But I've put pretty much everything out there, from sitting in the bathtub and pulling out my hair by the handful to laying on the bathroom floor and actually hoping to vomit so the nausea would go away.
In some of our conversations, she's given me way more credit than I deserve for being a fighter. And while it's true that I did approach my battle with a certain degree of feistiness, that was just packaging. It doesn't matter if you do the whole cancer thing with a good attitude or not. What matters is that you do it.
I can admit (now) that I was going for some kind of Olympic gold medal in kicking cancer's butt. I missed four days of work for my surgery and four days of work during chemo. During radiation, after I'd been fighting for close to six months, I decided I deserved a mental health day. I threw a baby shower and a birthday party for my then-80-year old grandfather, got my gold belt in Tae Kwon Do and did all sorts of other things -- during treatment-- to prove that cancer couldn't hold me down. In the end, the only thing I got was exhausted. Nobody gave me a gold star on my chart. Because you don't get points for style or difficulty when fighting cancer. It's not the way you cross the finish line that matters, just that you do.
Honestly, the only thing that I would have changed about my cancer treatment was how I treated myself. I would have taken some more time off and not pushed myself so hard. I'd have taken a few more naps and let a few more people do things for me. This is my advice to anyone getting ready for treatment: take care of yourself, don't worry about what other people will think of you, take a nap, and give yourself a gold star, because you deserve it.
In some of our conversations, she's given me way more credit than I deserve for being a fighter. And while it's true that I did approach my battle with a certain degree of feistiness, that was just packaging. It doesn't matter if you do the whole cancer thing with a good attitude or not. What matters is that you do it.
I can admit (now) that I was going for some kind of Olympic gold medal in kicking cancer's butt. I missed four days of work for my surgery and four days of work during chemo. During radiation, after I'd been fighting for close to six months, I decided I deserved a mental health day. I threw a baby shower and a birthday party for my then-80-year old grandfather, got my gold belt in Tae Kwon Do and did all sorts of other things -- during treatment-- to prove that cancer couldn't hold me down. In the end, the only thing I got was exhausted. Nobody gave me a gold star on my chart. Because you don't get points for style or difficulty when fighting cancer. It's not the way you cross the finish line that matters, just that you do.
Honestly, the only thing that I would have changed about my cancer treatment was how I treated myself. I would have taken some more time off and not pushed myself so hard. I'd have taken a few more naps and let a few more people do things for me. This is my advice to anyone getting ready for treatment: take care of yourself, don't worry about what other people will think of you, take a nap, and give yourself a gold star, because you deserve it.
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