When you have children, you want to protect them from all the evils of the world. You monitor their friends, their time on technology, and you do whatever you can to protect their innocence. I remember when my best friend died in a house fire when I was ten and my mom trying to protect me from her death. I understand now why she did that.
I mean, let's be honest, childhood is about being happy and thinking the world is great. It is such a short time and you have plenty of time to see the uglier side of life. So what happens when one of the parents gets a serious illness or even worse, passes away?
When I got diagnosed, I should have done a better job protecting my children's innocence, but in all honesty I was in shock and new to the whole Lung Cancer thing. At the beginning, I thought I was doing a good job protecting them, but then my youngest two keep asking me about death and telling me how truly scared and worried they are for mommy. Dealing with a serious illness in the family is a subject adults have a hard time with, let alone children.
I love my children. Mine are crazy little emotional things that wear me out all day, but melt my heart at the end of the day with their sleepy eyes and funny pajamas. My little miracles have brought me so much joy especially in this scary situation.
Oh and then there's the comments I get..."you don't look like you have cancer", what exactly does cancer look like? Cancer doesn't always look like a person in a head scarf. Cancer often looks just like you. Cancer looks like me.
I didn't realize this before I got sick. I had the ignorant luxury of presuming that just because someone looked normal on the outside, that they were feeling normal on the inside. I mean, regular ups and downs, yes, I appreciated that. But, I never guessed that the person in line in front of me at the store might have built their whole day around that one single errand, and absolutely dragged their sick ass there by the force of sheer will. Now I don't go anywhere without wondering who in the crowd might be like me, masquerading as a normal person and feeling anything but, it makes me a much kinder person.
This past month has been the roughest for me...the thoracotomy, being diagnosed with lung cancer, and living on oxygen...and on its face, it makes absolutely no sense. I am tethered to Oxygen pretty much 24/7, having Pneumonia twice since my surgery, running fever, and vomiting into my reliable toilet...yes..this shit sucks! And I didn't even see it coming!
Now, I look pretty much like myself, albeit with crappier skin, oxygen, and crappy hair. But, I FEEL more like a cancer patient. Last year is a blur. I went from having Wegener's to having Lung Cancer. How does that happen? Now that I know that I have cancer, it feels like a role, a play act. I am waiting for the curtain to life.
But, this damn show, it just keeps going on. Who wrote this shit? It is absolutely a terrible script!
For now, I will conclude with this: My lungs are crap. I am not sure about other parts of my body...I go for a Pelvic Exam tomorrow and hopefully that comes back normal. In the midst of all of this, I am learning every single day. I am learning how to pull myself out of the muck and go on. I am fighting the extreme fatigue and the pain. I am learning how to minimize self-pity and maximize empathy for others. I am learning that I have the strength to travel this road, even though I didn't choose it, and that doesn't make me special. We are all capable of rising when we must, even if we don't want to contemplate that. Strength is always around us. Just take a moment to look a little closer at the person in line behind you. They might not look like they have cancer. But they might.
2 Corinthians 5:7
"We live by faith, not by sight."
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