It’s been five years.
Five years ago, I completed treatment for anal cancer and was told the cancer was gone.
I was also told, in so many words, “If you make it five years, you’ll be considered cancer-free.” (They don’t say “cured” anymore.)
So here I am five years later.
I made it.
A friend once told me, “A day will come when you don’t even think about cancer.”
I’m still waiting.
It seems ungrateful to complain. To God be the glory that I’m not dead.
I celebrated the sixth birthday of my oldest granddaughter this week. Lots of little girls didn’t have a grandma at their birthday because their grandmas didn’t “make it.”
Maybe it’s all the attention that COVID has gotten in the past year that’s bothering me. They say 600,000 Americans died of COVID in the past year. Well, 600,000 Americans died of cancer last year, too. (And millions in the years before that.)
COVID has created “long haulers.” They are people who suffer symptoms long after the disease should have disappeared. Ongoing suffering is terrible, and I wish them all a rapid return to complete health.
But cancer survivors are long haulers, too.
Others don’t see the scars and missing body parts reflected in our bathroom mirrors. Arms and legs swollen from radiation damage are hidden under long sleeves and compression stockings. Quick trips to the bathroom and the humiliation of not quite making it are hidden, too.
We don’t talk about post-cancer “romance” in polite company, or any company really. Sometimes the grief is overwhelming.
We “survivors” (oh, how I hate the term) find encouragement when we catch up in the grocery store.
“How ya doin’? Sucks, huh?” “Yah. You?”
“Same.”
“But hey, we’re not dead, right?” “Gotta be thankful for that.”
And so we are.
We are a little bit mad about the compression stockings, the bathroom trips, the missing body parts, the brain fog and all the other life-altering impacts of cancer and its treatment.
But mostly we are grateful that we are still here and can say things like, “Happy sixth birthday, Sweet Tenley Louise. Grandma loves you.”