Happy Anniversary Cancer!

Four years ago I was diagnosed with stage three cancer. This has turned into an anniversary like my birthday or my sobriety date, except no one really celebrates it with me. I don’t really know how I should feel about today other than my life is completely different now.

I also quit smoking cigarettes that day. It’s weird to think that it is the second and less important thing that happened that day. It wasn’t planned, I just ended up quitting because by the time I could go outside, I had one less testicle, a lung full of cancer, and several months of chemotherapy to look forward to. I have been know to be insane, but not that insane. Not that I didn’t think about it.

It’s not like I don’t miss smoking, I do. I love it. It still looks cool to me. I just don’t want to start again. I don’t want to have to do something. I might enjoy it once in a while, but most of the time it was a let down. I had to do it. I had/have cancer.

I think about this day four years ago a lot. I feel like it will never not be pertinent to my life. It was the day I became a mortal. I fully understood the speed of time. It had happened very quickly. I now know that I will die. It isn’t an intellectual knowledge that death will someday happen to me, but now I feel it’s impending approach and what it actually means.

After I had come out of the cloud of disease that first time, I felt dark and depressed. I had a hard time dealing with getting through such a monumental struggle to find myself wishing for solitude and numbness, and I wondered why. I had stood in reality with all of me and it was painful. Nothing could bring me out of my head during those months. I had to endure each moment.

It’s funny to realize that, especially with everything about how being in the moment is this therapeutic and spiritual tool that a lot of people use. The moment in real pain is excruciating. Life after that seems mundane and meaningless. It’s hard not to look around and realize that everything is just made up. I had to find a new purpose.

This anniversary is confusing. It marks the beginning of my altered life, my new understanding of what my purpose is, and the thing that I survived. I lived when a lot of others died. I have survived two diseases; first was the diseases of the mind when I got sober and then the diseases of the body when I got cancer.

The mind and the body do not get along. They keep secrets from each other and they betray each other constantly. Sometimes one of them is distracted and then the other takes over. You find yourself facing a life changing pain-bomb. My body reacts to thing while my mind tries to numb me from feeling anything. My body begins to get fussy, so my mind tells my hand to grab my phone and scroll through hours of Instagram. My stomach starts to do flips from anxiety, my mind makes me watch several episodes of police procedural shows. Anything to make sure I don’t go down that road my body is trying to go.

Now my body is no where near what it was before four years ago. It isn’t used the same way it used to, and now I have cancer again. I am sometimes less than thrilled to try and survive this again. Luckily for me it is easily survived this time, but I am tired of being in constant struggle physically.

It’s easy for me to want to succumb to the darkness of being sick. Most people say they wouldn’t blame me. I have watched people much less sick than me go off their rockers. I see people who aren’t even sick at all unable to even go to work.

It’s easy for me to take for granted where my life is today. Not that my life was bad four years ago, but my life as it was then ceased to exist: my health, my relationship, my job, my group of friends, and my home all went away during that first year. I had literally lost most things in my life I cared about. I luckily had my parents and my brother and his family.

Now I am getting through cancer again with hardly any of the pain as before, I have a job I love, a home I love being in, many new friends in my life, and a fiancé.

When people think they want things to be more real, I can attest that they actually do not. You want to have a buffer between you and that dark place. You want to believe in things. The people furthest away from reality think they will die for some of those things they believe in. Others become addicted and compulsive with those things. I know that I need to remember where I have come from four years ago to know that I like being here and not there. I know that a book or a movie is sweet release. I know that I have felt reality and it is a terrifying place that I am tired of being.

Reality only sets in once in a while this go around, so I am grateful for that. I now have a measure of what I am going through. I can only wish for this to not be in my life for a long time, but cancer is a power greater than myself and a complete mystery. It doesn’t care for mine or your wishes or prayers. All I can hope for is luck.

So, happy anniversary to me! I am four years away from time I was personally introduced to cancer. It is not invited to my wedding.