TheBanyanTree: It Hurt

[Monique Colver]

There are indeed a great many people with cancer these days, both in your
neck of the woods and elsewhere. A friend of mine was recently diagnosed
with melanoma, but fortunately they got it all and she's going to be fine.
Does that mean she never really had cancer at all? That she shouldn't have
worried herself about her mortality at all?

Cancer is one of the things we have no control over. We can try to prevent
it, we can live a healthy lifestyle and reduce our chances, we can fight it
before it arrives, and we can fight it after it arrives. We can throw
everything at it that we've got to beat it into submission, but sometimes
everything we can do it is not enough, and it will prevail in the end.
That's the thing with cancer, any cancer. It can be cured. It can be beaten.
It can also take our life despite the best care, the best treatment. It's
unpredictable, and it's a terrible waste of perfectly good lives.

Another friend of mine recently died from cancer. You all know that. He was
given a death sentence with his diagnosis. "You have this," the doctor said,
"and you will not survive it." Nice cheery thoughts. "You may live a couple
of years, you may not." He didn't. He fought it, and for a while it seemed
he was making progress. He even started looking forward to his future, to
being able to do some of the things he wanted to do before his time was up,
since it seemed the cancer wasn't going to strike him dead immediately. It
didn't work out that way.

My first friend, who survived melanoma, is no less a victim of cancer than
he is. She survived, and he did not. His was worse, in every respect, except
in one way: they both had cancer, and cancer can, and often does, kill. It's
that knowledge that unites all those who are given a diagnosis of cancer.
It's knowing so many others who have not made it through, and knowing that
we too are just as susceptible, and that we may recover, or we may not.

Surviving cancer of any kind is no cause to feel guilt. "Weren't really
sick" my ass. Forgive my lapse into vulgarity, but really. It's cancer. You
were sick. Cancer by its very definition means you were sick. You were in
grave danger, and you needed all the help you could get. Any of us who gets
cancer of any kind needs all the help we can get.

Some people are just wrong.

Monique