Elephants and Tea - December 2019 - 10

Dear Cancer...

Dear Cancer,
There are so many things I want to say to you.
My mind is swirling right now as I try to put
my thoughts to paper. Well, laptop, but I don't
think that's a saying yet. I mean, should I keep
it optimistic and politically correct by speaking only of the good? Dare I venture into that
dark space of my heart and air out the bad?
Since your departure from my life, I was
left behind to pick up all the broken pieces
of myself that YOU created. The bad. All the
good that has come from our time together
wasn't because of you. It was because of the
faith I had in my True Creator, family and
friends. They exuded love and laughter to
clean up YOUR mess. And since this is a
letter to you, I'm almost obligated to air out
the bad. I deserve to be heard and to have
closure regardless of whether or not you'll
actually receive this message.
You see, I feel heavily laden with survivor's
guilt. Constantly forcing myself to remember
that "at least I'm still alive," has placed me
in a limbo. Not sick enough to be grouped
with those still fighting for their lives, but not
normal enough to be grouped with those who
have had the privilege of never knowing you
firsthand. It's like I don't belong anywhere.
Why did you have to pick this stage of my
life to show up?
Were you not aware that I didn't have a
husband yet? That I was steadily climbing up
that corporate ladder? That I was in no position whatsoever to discuss family planning,
or lack thereof, with my significant other?

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DECEMBER 2019

FIGHTERS
That I still wanted at least the opportunity
to maybe fail at breastfeeding? DID YOU
NOT KNOW??
You did this to me and you don't even
care. You hid there inside of me, lingering,
lurking, like the unwanted stranger you are.
My life was great before I discovered you. I
mean, it had its problems, but who didn't? It
was NORMAL.
I so envy those that love who they are now,
even after you so purposefully stole time
away from them. They're the true survivors.
You gave them an opportunity to take more
calculated risks, to realize how they really
wanted to live life, to become more confident
individuals by learning to trust their gut. Me?
I had all of that before you came into my life.
And now that you're gone, fortunately and
gratefully gone, you took it all away with you.
How dare you? That was not yours to take!
When I first discovered your existence,
latching onto my body like the mooching
parasite you are, I was in a new relationship.
We JUST decided to move in together. Your
presence made things THAT much harder.
Who forces new couples to discuss what they
would do if natural conception was an impossibility? If they would be okay with adoption/
IVF/surrogacy? And if so, how would they
pay for it? Would we want to freeze just eggs
or fertilize them and then freeze them? Before or after treatment? How many rounds?

Would I still be alive to even make use of
them? Would we even still be together? If
not, do we destroy the embryos we made?
Are we okay with terminating created life?
Would we have to lawyer up to resolve this?
And all these postulations are assuming
we would eventually get married. Otherwise,
these decisions had to be made one-sided.
Did I want to delay treatment to harvest eggs
just to freeze them? Would there be enough
retrieved so that another harvesting wasn't
necessary? And if we broke up, how would I
explain this to anyone I dated? Would they be
okay with the possibility of not biologically
fathering children? Or creating that biological family using science? Also, where would I
safely and securely store this "pre-life?" How
much would that cost?
Thanks for paring me down to a monthly
self-storage unit.
Because of the toxic chemicals I had coursing through my veins, you know, the medicine that helped get rid of you, for whatever
reason has made it physically impossible for
me to continue my career in the laboratory.
Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed of
becoming a scientist. Of course, there are
other ways to contribute to the industry, but
my foot in the door is no longer there. You
pushed it out! Starting over from scratch is
only a blessing if you loathed the direction
you were heading toward in the first place.

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Elephants and Tea - December 2019

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