The Cancer Balance Sheet
The balance sheet keeps changing. Life is a continuing set of trade-offs. Does the good outweigh the bad? It's easy for cancer patients to say we've gotten a bad deal. How is it that we could be going along blindly and then all of a sudden, on one fateful day, have everything change?
We add up the losses. The first thing we lose is our future. It becomes something to be counted in months, maybe years if we're lucky, but certainly not decades. And by losing the future, we lose some of our dreams. We lose the sense that all things are still possible. Life becomes narrower.
We lose sleep. Sometimes because we're just too sick to sleep, there's no way to get comfortable. But usually it's because sometimes night is the time when we think about what has happened to us, what is happening inside our bodies. We think about our deaths. Is there a cancer patient who hasn't already thought through his or her own funeral? Who should the speakers be? What might they say?
We lose some of our strength, certainly physical strength. Sometimes we're just too tired to work out. Sometimes the pain, or nausea, or just that feeling of the chemo-blahs is too much for us to overcome. The treadmills, the weights, all sit in the corner, unused.
It's easy to lose our optimism. How can you keep a positive outlook? How can you believe things will turn out okay, that tomorrow will be better than today? The cancer patient is bombarded with bad news from that first black day of diagnosis. So many months to live. Tubes to be inserted, medicines to take, the old lifestyle lost, replaced by a new one that is, quite frankly, a whole lot scarier.
When you look at the life of a cancer patient, it certainly seems that Death has put his finger on the scales, weighing them down in the "bad" direction.
Can anything possibly balance out what we've lost to this disease? Can anything replace the parts of our lives that have been stolen from us?
So is there anything on the other side of the scales? We make new friends. We reconnect with old friends. We learn again, if we've forgotten it in the crush of our daily lives, just how important a kind word, a touch, a look can be. We learn that even if they say the wrong thing, our friends are trying to reach out to us.
We look at life differently. Each day becomes precious, even the bad days. We all talk about living life to the fullest, stopping to smell the roses. You know the cliches. But when you can hear the clock ticking, enjoying the little things becomes even more important, and even more satisfying.
We learn things that other people don't know. I said to a friend the other day, "I know things that you don't know." He asked me what, and I couldn't really answer him, not in any coherent way. I just know things.
And in the end, we discover, or rediscover, our strength. It takes so much to get through the physical challenges of cancer. But the mental challenges are even tougher. We learn we're stronger than we ever thought. We can get through this. We can get our friends and loved ones through it, too.
So can any of these things, or all of them taken together, outweigh the bad? Or at least balance them? I don't know. I know that for five years, I worked 15 hours a day, sacrificing my life for my job. Was that a good balance? I know I'm a different person now, that I wouldn't make that choice again. For that matter, I'm a different person than I was 10 months ago, when I was first diagnosed.
When my life is put on the scales to be judged, will it balance out? I think so. Cancer is just one part of my life. It's not the whole thing.
6:06 AM ET | 10- 9-2006 | permalink
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