Moms Don’t Get Sick

I have never been someone to use my time longing for something someone else has. Sure, I’ve drooled over someone else eating a delicious baked good but never consumed by the feeling of jealousy. Until I got my cancer diagnosis. It didn’t happen right away, I was too wrapped up in what felt like a stampede of new information to fully understand what I was about to be thrust into. This envy began with a slow burn to which I wasn’t even completely conscious of. The first time it reared its ugly head was during my spell of symptoms from my first round of chemotherapy. I live on a cul-de-sac that leads to a path that most people in the neighborhood take walks or runs through. I have used this path countless times for exercise or to take my kiddos to the lake to see the ducks. From my living room window, you can see as people pass on their way to the path with their trusty dog, stroller, or friend in tow. As I sat there in my husband’s lay-z-boy watching each person pass, I found myself desperately wishing I could get up and even just walk to the mailbox and back. Here my neighbors were showing off how healthy they were as I sat in my house feeling like Ursula’s worm people from the Little Mermaid. I had the puke bucket in one hand and the book I couldn’t focus on in the other under countless blankets praying I would make it to the bathroom when the next diarrhea storm started. I was 28 years old, during the week of thanksgiving, wondering how my body could be so fragile. Asking God why I had cancer in the first place. I lived in that mental space for a while but once I saw my breast having a positive reaction to the chemotherapy, I felt this hope that I was going to beat this and be back on track to a normal life.

Fast forward six months, I was now the proud owner of a flat chest and had started radiation on my chest wall. I finally felt like the finish line was in sight. What I didn’t know was that my cancer was going to put its leg out and trip me steps away from said finish line. I would soon learn that the cancer had moved to my brain and I was officially stage four. There was no longer a way out of this cancer. I would be battling this for the rest of my life and I would never know how long “the rest of my life” would be. I began watching parents as they shopped at the grocery store with their kids and thinking to myself how they just got to walk through life with their children without the burden of limited time hanging over them. I saw couples on dates enjoying each other and I’d be thinking to myself how they didn’t have to consider how many dates they had left together. I would hear people making plans for the future and wanting to scream because my future was now a maybe. I lived in this suffocating, toxic mind set for longer than I would like to admit. There are also thoughts I had towards strangers that I cannot even bring myself to say out loud. I was lost in my cancer and I wasn’t sure I would ever find the fighter I was before this.

that’s when I would think of her. The girl I was before I was diagnosed with cancer, that bitch. She would have a bad morning because the scale said a pound more or she wouldn’t take the risk that day because there were more days to come. She would forget to kiss her husband goodbye because she would just see him later. I started to loath her entirely. I would see pictures of her long hair, bushy eyebrows, energetic bright eyes and want to melt to the floor. It would take me months to realize I didn’t hate her but I was refusing to mourn her.

I was still alive and fighting because of my past self. She had advocated for me in ways no one else would. I would never be that person again but because of that person I was still alive. My life is now extremely different but I am living. My outside appearance and my attitude may never be the same but I am now grateful because I was given a second chance at life. Hearing someone with stage 4 cancer say that might be confusing but my old self had an expiration date that was vastly approaching. I have now hit the reset button. If I look at it as a loss, I will go insane. I started at a high level of insanity to beginning with so we would be running full speed towards padded rooms and straight jackets if I didn’t change my frame of mind. My old self had to leave so that this new phase of myself could live on and for that I am eternally grateful.