In the name of practicality, I had given up my dreams; In the name of maturity, I was settling for a very unsatisfactory life; in the name of understanding, I was permitting myself to be addressed with disrespect (even those little teasing jokes can hurt you).
I had a wonderful oncologist who told me, "I can do surgery and I can do medicine, but I can't save your life. You have to make your life so full of wonderful things that you just don't have time to die. You have to chase away the fear and embrace the joy so that your immune system can fight this thing."
After that, I always said that cancer gave me my life back.
However, at the same time I was diagnosed with the recurrence, a few dozen cars drove into a thick fog band on Interstate 5 and several of them didn't come out alive. On their way to work, to visit, to shop, whatever - bang! It was done. Those who died had no chance to fear death, to put their "affairs in order," to say goodbye, to take that last trip to Yosemite, to find friends on the internet, to learn to paint, to buy a guitar after all these years, to discover their purpose, to find right work, to - anything, ever again.
Me? I'm on notice about my mortality. It's true that anyone can die any time (like a truck could run them over), but that doesn't seem to influence how we think or how we live, for the greater part of our lives. We think there will be time later for the important stuff but there is no "later" that anyone can really rely on.
That bad joke says, "no one gets out of here alive."
Unlike many (not all) so-called "healthy people" we can open our hearts and our conversations to strangers, originating our conversations in a deep-seated love and understanding that comes from facing life's frailties and looking death in the eye: that really gives a person a great perspective. It's our relationship with cancer that has made a forum like this possible. We know ego and pretense are a waste of everyone's precious time.
So we have the advantage: we truly have an opportunity to be alive. Like other people we have long term dreams, but we also have short term demands on the quality of our days. This same demand for quality of living in the present is the strongest ammunition we can give to our most powerful ally - our immune systems.
So when I know someone who has died from cancer, I say to myself, "there's someone who has truly lived." And when I know someone who has had cancer and lived, I say "that's how I'd like to do it, it I can."
Humor Of An Ignoring Nurse!
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