Accepting That You Have Cancer

You. Have. Cancer.

Those three words are the very words that both changed and destroyed my life forever. I was twenty-three years old when I first heard that word pertaining to myself. I was sitting in the emergency after a series of multiple tests the physician assistant had ordered be ran on me. At the time, I told her she was ridiculous, and they were wasting time and insurance money running all those tests because I was just fine. I convinced myself I was just stressed out and tired.

I sat there, zoning out as the doctor and physician assistant before me started talking options with me. I remember hearing the words surgery, oncology and radiation. I don’t know if I was in shock, or truly just didn’t want to believe it, but I refused to accept what they had said. I asked to be discharged and I left. I made an appointment with my primary physician and got the same news. I got another opinion, and then one more after that before I finally just said okay, well maybe I’m the one who is wrong.

I went home and I sat on my couch, where my sister and grandmother sat, said the three words that had spoken to me, and expected them to cry, or ask about the details, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t get the warm support I had been looking for, in fact I got the opposite. 

And so, after that, I pretended that it wasn’t true, and refused any and all treatment. I mean, if my own family didn’t care, why would anyone else? That was the mindset I had. I began to think that I didn’t deserve to be around, and that people would be better off without me, so I was fully willing to let the cancer kill me. I thought it was what I wanted.

Until one day I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take the pain anymore, and I told someone. Through telling someone, I told someone else, and so on until the secret was finally out, and to my surprise there were so many people supporting me that I didn’t know what to do with it.

I remember one day I had gone to a support group, my first and last. I heard these people going through the exact same things that I was going through. Yet, it only made me feel worse. To hear all their sadness, how hard they fought. Chemo, and radiation, which only make them sick and weak. They were doing all these treatments just to be worse off and only living on borrowed time, and I just couldn’t take it. I hadn’t fully accepted my diagnosis at the time, but hearing their stories only made me want to quit. It gave me no desire to try to fight, and I knew that if I had any chance, I needed positivity  and I wasn’t going to get that from a depressing support group. So, instead I surrounded myself with the few people who believed in me and was trying their very best to support me in the ways that they knew how.

You see, cancer doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t pick and choose its victims. You could be the most amazing person in the world, and even then, you won’t be exempt. You could be a billionaire with more privilege than anyone in the world, and it still wouldn’t make you an exception to cancer. It just chooses people. Good, and bad. Rich and poor. Old and young. Male and female. Students and teachers. Cancer doesn’t care. It chooses you and then you’re suddenly part of a community that you never asked to be in. You’re put into a war that you don’t want to fight.

But the thing is, you have to fight because if you don’t, in a matter of time you’ll just be dead. You’ll have to leave this world without accomplishing a single thing that you wanted to do. So really, what do you have to lose?