My Sister's Keeper

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if it wasn't curable. What would I have done if it had been caught later, if I had stopped responding to treatment, if it got to the point where I was signing up for experimental trials to open up, even though I knew there was no hope that they would work.

My prognosis was hopeful when I was diagnosed. Cancer hadn't spread, type was shown to respond well to treatment. Of course, it was still cancer. It was metastatic, but just because it hadn't spread, didn't mean it was going to be an easy ride. And it wasn't.

You'll never understand what it means to "fight for your life" until you are literally fighting to stay alive. What's funny is that it isn't even a conscious decision half the time. It happens while you are asleep; trying to escape from the nightmare that has become your reality. You let yourself slip away, grateful that you don't have to think about anything. And that is when the boxing gloves come out. Because who wants to give up the ability to dream?

I'm glad I didn't die. Sounds terribly blunt, but it's true. I feel like I should say something profound, but really, I'm just trying to grasp at facts that sometimes seem so unreal. My life is so close to normal now that I sometimes forget I had cancer. I had cancer. I had cancer. I had cancer. I forget about the sleepless nights, about the bald head, about being so sick that I thought my stomach was going to land in the toilet, about losing days at a time while being in a drugged induced coma, about the last time I went up the stairs without having to think twice about knees or bones or breathing. Sometimes it all seems so blurry and unreal. Sometimes it all seems so horrible that I choose not to remember.

But it happened. I had cancer.

And I think that it's okay to forget about terrible things that happen to us sometimes. I've learned that if you hold onto something so scary too tightly, you'll never be able to swim forward. You'll just carry a boulder on your back until you sink so deep you lose sight of the shore. But here's the truth: terrible things happen. And sometimes you can come back from them fast. And sometimes it takes a long time to pick up all of those pieces and glue them all together. And even after you put that last piece in, you're still cracked. You are not the same.

Being different is okay, though. You catch the light differently, form new shapes and surfaces and create new textures. And that's the beauty of it all. If you go through that painstaking process of picking up all those shards and gluing them back together, you become different; you become better. You become a kaleidoscope of everything you were and everything that you could have become, mixed with everything you are now. If you let yourself, you cant take those pieces of a beautiful piece of artwork and turn it into a masterpiece.

I'm a five year cancer survivor and I'm still coming back. I'm still putting my pieces together. I'm cracked and scarred and sometimes things happen that ruin a lot of the work I've done. But I won't let that stop me. When I'm tired, I simply close my eyes and let the boxing gloves come out while I escape to some magical place. It helps me remember that I am still full of dreams and I never want to give them up.

And so, when I wake up the next morning, I whisper to myself: "I will try again today."