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For Those Who Have Survived Cancer
Have you shed the “mental baggage?”
It’s been about five and a half years, or maybe six — I’m not sure as I tend to block such things out — since I last called my Dad on Father’s Day, or dropped off a gift.
He’s no longer around as he died from Stage 4 lung cancer, as did my mother, two weeks after her husband of sixty-plus years.
Around the time they passed, I was finishing up four weeks of radiation therapy for my own diagnosis of breast cancer. Caught early, thankfully.
It was a triple diagnosis for my family and about as surreal as it gets. As anyone who has experienced this knows, a cancer diagnosis changes you. Like, forever.
Even though I realize how blessed I am, I realize that I must be ever vigilant. Because the specter of this evil disease takes purchase in the deepest recesses of my brain, taunting me, whispering to me in the wee hours, “Will it come back?” “Where, and when?”
That’s not a way to live and I know that. But it’s damn near impossible not to obsess over every odd bump, sore and mole that pops up on my body.
If you’re one of the roughly 1.8 million people diagnosed with cancer in this year alone, sadly, you know where I’m coming from.
