As children we are all taught to share. Share you toys (which we did reluctantly except for the ones that we had become bored of), Share your food (You can have any vegetable on my plate!), Share your room (this line represents my half). Through some miracle of parenting, we grow out of being selfish. We give to charity, we loan our trucks to anyone moving, the cloths off of our backs, change to strangers who had just to ask. We become model citizens. And then we get cancer.
No one wants us to share our cancer with them, NO ONE! And before you think Ive lost it, we don't want to share it either. Yes, we'd love to get rid of it or just simply make one big sneeze that clears it of our bodies of it and flush it. Yet, we wouldn't inflict this on our worst enemies! That is if we had enemies, because being model citizens we, of course, don't. Now that we have cancer, we have to become selfish. We have to take care of ourselves before we can do anything else. Mothers and Fathers upset the order of their households. Single people, ignore their friends. And so on. Then enter the primary caretaker! The primary caretakers job is to allow you to be selfish. They are at your beck and call, day and night to do your bidding! Well this may be the dream version of the primary caretaker, but you get the idea. The problem with primary caretakers, is that they are only human. They still have jobs, still get colds and still have feelings. It's not a perfect system, but hey, it's the one we have. Or at least the one I have. I am sure that somewhere out there there are cancer patients going thru this alone, and to you my heart goes out. I cannot imagine what that would be like. I have read and met some people who made the decision to face this on there own. They only told a select few or one and forbade them to tell a living soul! OH HELL NO! God may have made me strong, but not that strong. I always knew if I was going to get thru this it wasn't going to be by myself!
That was most likely the first selfish thing I did as it relates to my cancer. The second was to second guess my doctors. Not that they aren't brilliant, but this is the age of the Internet we are living in. (and if your a frankentongue reader you already know that my doctor told me I could drink soda, which really made me question him). In this day and age of information, it is the cancer patients responsibility to seek out and find everything that is at their disposal and make an informed decision whether or not to add it to their arsenal of healing tools. And in practicing our selfishness we often enlist others in that process. I am blessed enough to have Ken, who reads all of the dry medical stuff for me then gives me the dumbed down version. I also have an amazing group of advisers around me who took this little trip before me. I rely on their expertise all of the time. Today, thanks to my friend Laura, I finally visited The Wellness Center of South Bay to sign up for a support group. I came away from that meeting not only have achieved that goal, but was refereed to an amazing acupuncturist as well (which is something that I had been looking into).
I have said many times that cancer survivors are a pay it forward kind of group. One of the greatest things about them is that they in their healing have already returned to the land of model citizens and can share with us new kids. It amazes me though, to see these remarkable people who you know have been thru so much just stop what ever they are doing in order to help you. My dear friend Theresa had thrown out her back but still insisted that she wanted to cook for me! Now that is some kinda friend! I don't think that I was ever that nice before cancer and only hope that one of the side effects of having had cancer is that I might be that nice. But thinking about it farther, I can already see little glimpses of it on the horizon. I was introduced to another one of my doctors patients their family just days before going into surgery. He had just completed three weeks of healing and had just that hour had his trech removed. This remarkable man used some of what I am sure where his first spoken words to tell me that I was in the best hands in the medical community. He wife told me that I would be in her prayers. Now just weeks from surgery myself, I have offered myself to my doctor. I am living proof that the surgery can be survived. I will be living proof that radiation and chemotherapy can be survived and in a short while, I will be living proof that cancer can be survived.
I won't be alone, however. As sad as it makes me, there is still cancer. There are going to be thousands of people discovering that if they want to live, then they are going to have to be at least a little selfish and take care of themselves, primary caretaker or not. It is up to each one of us to decide that we want to live. And that is only the first decision we have to make. There will be hundreds along the way. So if you know someone who has cancer and can't stop talking about it (or blogging about it) just know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Soon they will be so busy helping other cancer patients that you'll never have to hear about it again. And that is what I call selfish with a little s!
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