When you settle on the type of car you think you want to buy, you suddenly see that car everywhere and it invariably feels like a sign from the universe. You’re absolutely MEANT to buy a Volvo, you think, because a cute old Volvo station wagon was remarkably parked in front of your apartment building this morning. God wants you to have a Volvo and that’s that.
Receiving a cancer diagnosis is a lot like buying a car, except you hope that God isn’t actually telling you something. Even before you’ve told people about it, cancer is absolutely everywhere you look. On TV, in the newspaper, at the Starbucks counter, and, needless to say, in every issue of O Magazine. Everywhere. I found myself wondering whether anyone in the world could possibly be just plain old-fashioned healthy.
Admittedly and predictably, my first thought was “Why me???” And if you’re lucky like me your entire social circle is ready to confirm that sentiment. “It’s unfair; it’s cruel; it’s meaningless and horrible. You poor thing!” I loved those friends and family members who said those things to me. I was especially grateful to them because I had (weirdly) assumed from an early age that I would one day get cancer and die young from it. I had a dark imagination, I suppose. So when I got my very own diagnosis I kept thinking – well, here it is: the moment I’d been waiting for. Having a whole bunch of people around me who were certain it was a totally random twist of fate made me feel better. They were a needed counterbalance to precious, longstanding “Terms of Endearment” reenactments cycling through my head.
This is not to say that I didn’t and don’t continue to feel enormous amounts of self-pity. I do. It’s just that I, like so many of my fellow ‘battlers’ (don’t love that term), secretly fear and believe that I’m to blame. Any therapist, including my own, will tell you this is normal but that you must not ever entertain this thought. Well, I did and everyone does. So there.
I’ve lived in Seattle, WA for six years, but was raised in Manhattan and am well known as one of those annoying east coast transplants that can’t shut up about how much better east coasters are in all ways. Only recently have I become a true west coast transplant, but that's for a later post.
I am the youngest of three daughters to our mother, a psychotically brilliant speller, piano player, spiritual dilettante, singer, psychiatric nurse and excellent tennis player, and father, a retired neurosurgeon, late-in-life golf prodigy and fellow “expect the worst” type. When my parents divorced the same year I got my period I decided that was the end of life as I knew it. Now that I’m on the other side of that phase (my period, I mean, thanks to the removal of my uterus recently), I can honestly say that my thirteen-year-old self really knew what she was talking about.
This is the story of my cancer diagnosis – Endometrial – and the mostly ridiculous incidents that ensued. I survived because of early detection. A very, eerily early diagnosis made it possible not only to survive but also to keep my ovaries in tact and avoid chemotherapy and radiation. Oh, and I lucked out with a very curable form of cancer.
These essays won’t tell you anything new about cancer. To be clear, I’ve had an especially easy time of it. I'm writing this series of essays to share my particular, light-weight cancer story to give representation to those of us who have actually benefited from awareness efforts, found cancer early, and then survived rather uneventfully (so, that’s it, I asked myself? Yes, that’s it). I guess I wanted to share my, dare I say it, “positive” experience if for no other reason than to offer a slightly less tragic view of a scary disease that strikes all of us in some way or other.
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