Fighting Cancer

There are a lot of hard things to deal with when fighting cancer. There's the treatments, surgeries, medicines, pain, concern of loved ones, struggling to eat healthy and exercise, and dealing with mortality.

But the hardest part is keeping your morale up.

Especially since you often need to keep the morale of the people who love you up as well.

Finding out you have cancer is like someone suddenly telling you that everything good in the world has been taken away. Your first thoughts are denial (not me!) followed by disbelief (it's a mistake) followed slowly by acceptance (I do have it) and then the struggle begins.

It's hard enough to find good news but when you are facing the fact that you have a disease that will kill you, unless it's one of the treatable cancers, or not if it's survivable it seems you hear even more about the people who don't survive or hear horror stories about people in so much pain they want to die. Let's face it, people like to share news of events so when loved ones die they post about it. They don't always post about the good milestones - being cancer free for 5 years or however many years it's been - unless it relates to themselves.  So it's easy to hear all the negative stories and not hear about the good ones.

But even harder to deal with, is the attitude of our loved ones. We need to think of ourselves as strong, as capable of fighting this disease, of making it through the treatments, and to be as healthy as we can be. So having people tell us or treat us as if we are helpless and fragile doesn't help us. Even when we are weak and throwing up everything and don't have the strength to lift anything or the stamina to move around much, don't tell us how weak and sick we are!  Help us find something to smile or even laugh at. Reassure us that tomorrow we'll be feeling better. Express faith that we'll get through this and be better and stronger for it.

I have an extremely rare cancer. I can't do the chemo or radiation therapies because they don't work on this cancer. I don't need to take any medicine because there isn't any pain and won't be until the end. Mostly what it does is make me look overweight and the surgery has taken away part of my stamina and my immune system is compromised. As the cancer grows it has several effects. It is a weight bearing me down. It eats away at my stamina so I tire easily. Bending over makes me feel nauseous. So I become restricted in what i can do and require more assistance. I will be going for another major surgery and hoping not to lose any more internal organs and that I can recover with more stamina than I currently have. I got back most of my stamina after the last surgery so hope to repeat that.

Right now though, I need more help than normal doing things. My husband and daughter are more than willing to help. All I have to do is ask. So I ask. They know how much my independence means to me so they don't make a fuss about it. My mother-in-law and one of my best friends get upset when I mention needing more help because they think I shouldn't be doing anything, that everything should be done for me because I'm sick. They don't understand how demoralizing that attitude is.

If you treat a person like they are helpless and they let it do it, they become helpless. If you treat them like everyone else, they prove themselves more capable than they thought. Cancer can be beaten and has been beaten. Even the terminal ones can be beaten back for a while. But the mental state, the morale, of the person fighting cancer makes the difference.

Eventually, everyone dies. We're mortal. That is our fate. How we die and when we die isn't always within our control. How we face death, that is within our control. Cancer patients learn to face mortality and decide how we are going to face death. Some people give up. Some people never have time to get out of the denial stage. Most of us face it with humour, strength, love, and a determination to live as long as we can.

Which means we fight to keep our morale high and rely on our loved ones to help us even as we help them keep their morale high. In the end, that's what matters. Helping one another.