Thoughts on a recent article about being a warrior

One reason I don't post to this blog as often now is I'm not sure if people are still interested in hearing my thoughts on these topics now that I'm "cancer free".  I guess if you're not interested you won't read it.  Anyway, let me know if you like these posts.  This entry is my thoughts around a recent article that appeared in New York Magazine.  I encourage you to read the article for yourself too. 


Good Morning America anchor Amy Robarch spoke at an event for Gilda's Club, an organization to support those living with cancer.  The wife of the author that wrote the article died from breast cancer a few years ago.  Needless to say, he wasn't impressed by Robarch's speech. I agree with many of the author's points, but while I didn't see her speech, I'm inclined to give Robarch the benefit of the doubt--maybe she was trying to be inspirational or hopeful.  Who knows.  If the audience was comprised of those living with cancer, maybe she misunderstood and should have had a better understanding of her audience.  As the author points out, most women don't need to get a double mastectomy.  However, if Robarch did that because she felt it would give her peace of mind, then that's her right.

One of Robarch's main themes was she "kicked cancer's butt".  There are many images associated with cancer--fighting it, beating it, kicking its ass.  (As an aside, I wrote a paper about this while in grad school at Tufts.  If I had any idea where that paper was, I'd love to read it now.)  Heck, even the title of this blog is centered around the same idea--cancer can't catch me.  When I went through treatment, those nine months were solely focused on just getting through it.  I didn't feel inspired or empowered.  I didn't feel like I was fighting it, beating it or kicking its ass.  I was terrified and trying to deal with the diagnosis and how my life had instantly changed.  The chemo days were the darkest.  There were many days that I didn't know if I could get through it.  I would cry at how shitty I felt and how the whole thing felt like it would never end.  Chemo SUCKED.  (Am I drama queen?  Perhaps.)

What I took out of the experience is while sometimes I still feel very vulnerable, I do feel tougher than I did before.  I was pretty tough before, but now I feel really tough.  Not because I beat cancer, but because I survived the last year and I'm still standing.  Maybe to some that means I kicked cancer's butt but it doesn't really resonate with me that way.

While I might be tougher, I still get scared.  I just saw on Facebook that a friend of a friend just passed away from breast cancer.  She was pregnant when she was diagnosed back in 2010 and the cancer came back.  Like me, she has two little kids.  She has an amazing spirit and some of her posts were so similar to mine it was eerie.  To say this is feeding into my deepest fears is a huge understatement.  I perused her blog but I had to stop because it was making me sad and scaring me.  But it's been haunting me all day.

The truth is that while many of us "beat cancer", it doesn't mean that those that didn't survive weren't strong enough to do it.  I didn't "beat" cancer because I was fought harder than somebody else or because I wanted it more.  I beat cancer because it was caught relatively early and my cancer responded to treatment.  Being in good physical shape probably helped my recovery, but who knows. I bet the majority of us know people who have died from cancer--while maybe some of them weren't in the best of health because of other conditions, none of them were "losers".  Everyone that I've known died from cancer was a fighter.  If my cancer metastasizes some day, does that mean I didn't fight hard enough? Methinks no.

Stuart Scott is an ESPN analyst.  I wasn't aware that he'd been battling (there's that word again, it's hard to escape it) abdominal cancer for the last several years until I heard about his speech at this year's ESPYs.  One of his quotes was, "When you die, that does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live and the manner in which you live." I love this quote.  Cancer will kill many of our family and friends and we will hate it for that, but our loved ones are not, and never will be losers.

Cancer--you suck. A lot.

I went to high school with a woman named April.  At some point we found each other on FB.  I never really knew April that well.  We had a few classes together and we didn't always agree on things, but she was still really nice.  After we connected on FB, she was one of those friends that you'd see updates on, but wouldn't necessarily interact with.

She had a little boy shortly after I had Belle.  Not long after that, she was diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare form of cancer.  She'd provide occasional updates on FB about treatment.  After being declared cancer-free at one point, her cancer returned.  I remember reading her posts and seeing all of the support that she received and thought, "wow, what a lucky woman to be surrounded by so many people that love her."  When I didn't see a post from her in awhile, I'd start to worry about her, but then she'd post an update and I'd know she was still around.  I was always relieved to see that.  I remember from her posts that she was getting treatment in Southern California for a while.   

After I was diagnosed, I thought of April.  I become more in awe of her as a woman and her commitment to surviving for her family and to see her little boy grow up.  I always wanted to write to her and tell her how much I admired her, but I never got around to it.  April passed away this week. 

April and I obviously have very different cancer stories, and I didn't know her that well even when I knew her 20 years ago, but I was so sad to hear that news.  It makes me so sad that she's going to miss out on seeing her little boy grow up, and he'll have to grow up without his Mommy.  He's only 3.5 years old.  And when I'm feeling morbid and wonder if I'm going to beat this, or if I'm going to find out in a few years that the cancer has metastasized, I immediately think the same thing about my girls.  I can't bear the idea of not seeing them grow up.  

There isn't a particular point to this post.  Mainly that it's so frustrating when cancer takes somebody, especially somebody so young.  Cancer--I've never liked you.  It's one thing to cause a lot of us a lot of pain, which we eventually recover from.  It's another to take an otherwise healthy young woman and take her from her family.