1 September 2011

Cancer. It's going around.

When I first got my diagnosis I mobilized my support system. I posted to my facebook page asking local peeps for medical recommendations and sent out an email to the Moms Club list for the same.

Almost immediately I received responses, but not just for which doctor or oncologist, rather people were giving me names/contacts of women who were in the same boat. It must be a pretty big freaking boat. So many people know someone who is or has already gone through this. (And now all my friends do too.) So I started reading others' blogs about it and sending emails and connecting with folks in the same club. ("Some club", says my cousin Carol who is fighting uterine cancer, "the dues are steep and where the hell is the buffet?" I come by my coping mechanism honestly from my mother's side of the family.) I am getting great advice, wisdom and musings from gals with experience.

But it is totally blowing me away how many people in our community have cancer. My sis sent me a book called The China Study which is a western medicine funded nutritional study linking diet to cancer. (As well as a number of other rampant diseases.) It's pretty disheartening to see scientific proof that we are setting ourselves up. The medicine has come leaps and bounds in the last 30 years, and there are more and more survivors, but the amount of deaths attributed to cancer remains static because there are so many more cases. We aren't winning the war against cancer, we're just keeping pace with the ever expanding front. But statistics certainly don't tell the story. Cancer is exceptionally personal and each of us is engaged in our own personal war.

The blogs I read are all so very different from each other and from my own. I think you all know how I am coping with this. Others use different methods. Some go on to be advocates or educators or support for others facing the same enemy. Some just come out knowing they met their match and bested it. I know I will be changed by this, and I suspect others are too, but essentially, cancer does not create anything that wasn't there before. Many people have commented how I am facing this bravely, or with spirit or strength but I am no different than I was a month ago or a year ago, and I'm no different than anyone else who has had to face a challenge like this. We all do what we can to move beyond it in our own special way. And if you have to face it you will do the same. But I hope you don't get your membership card, because the dues are steep and there's no buffet.