by Heather A. Davis
When you’re swallowing a pill full of radiation while sitting in a hospital room next to one of the kindest men you’ve ever met, a hospital worker who is holding your hand and who is crying because he has the same thyroid cancer you have, and he worries about the effect the radiation will have on his ability to have children if the time comes for him to swallow the pill…
When you are so sick that you can’t hold your head up and finally a doctor listens, tells you that you’ve had thyroid cancer for approximately five years and you rage and scream the world down around you…
When they say this is the “good” cancer and yet you know others are dying from it, and they’ve just issued guidance against screening for life-saving neck checks…
When you become a preexisting condition…
When, just in case, you go to the lawyer to draw up your will and your powers of attorney, then to the cemetery to pick out and pre-pay for your burial plot, and you put away the thought that you’re too young for this…
When you lose almost every current friend because they’re scared of what’s happening to you and your erratic emotions and they’re sick of hearing how sick you are, but you don’t blame them because you want to run as far away from this as you can, too…
When you hand-write letters to former friends or lovers to thank them for their kindness and the good things they did for you, even when you were a jerk, but you leave off your return address and leave out the fact that you have cancer because it’s too painful to think about them not writing back…
When you start to lie on the floor every night, in the dark, begging, pleading and bargaining for your life with a God you’re so afraid of, and now believe is punishing you or teaching you a “lesson” and you’re too afraid to utter a bad word, think a bad thought, do a bad deed, give a bad look at another human being because if you just do the right thing, it will all go away and the punishment will stop…
When your surgeon chooses to leave a small remnant of the tumor so that he doesn’t have to cut your vocal cord nerve and take away your ability to speak forever, and when your doctors are compassion embodied…
When you’ve fought so long against the “cult of positivity” and you have to face the impact that hope and positivity can have on your mind, your body, your spirit because despair is a great redeemer…
When you finally find the thyroid cancer support group, beautiful courageous people who show you you’re not alone, who know exactly what you’re going through, and who encourage you every day to arrest your falling apart, so that in time, you can do the same for others…
When the counselor at the free-services cancer support community center helps you finally get the help you need because you don’t understand that your anxiety is too high even for a cancer patient, that Thyca can do this to you when you have limited capacity to regulate chemical or hormonal imbalances, and the helpers you find change your life…
When your endocrine system starts to level out with life-saving medication…
When you finally listen to your colleagues and start that Ph.D. and you set up a partnership across countries, and a scientist/doctor you worked with there and the professors you’ve just met here are willing to take a chance on you and your health inequalities research over the next five years, and you decide you’ll show up for your life just like they are showing up for your life…
When you write “over the next five years” for the first time…
When you’re walking or dancing or moving in some way and you start to really feel your body and the miracle of its movement and its natural endorphins, a numinous connection nothing else can produce in you, and for the first time in your life, you know your body is not the enemy…
When you’re lying on the floor in the darkness with only the cats around you and you’re thanking God now instead and slowly and painfully you start to feel there is love and comfort there and that this love is God, is all beliefs and none, all knowledge, all wisdom, all peace, in whatever way God appears or is uttered in people’s lives. When you can no longer go a second without being plugged into that love and joy and peace…
When you reconcile that no matter what happens or what you did or what you ate or what you drank or what you didn’t do, it is not your fault you have cancer…
When you can think of the future and take calculated or spontaneous risks, and see life ahead…
When you vote for legislators who’ve been representing your community for nearly 30 years and who promise you they won’t take away coverage for preexisting conditions only to learn the hard truth that that is exactly what they voted for…
When you start meeting the amazing people from all walks of life—politicians, doctors, nurses, teachers, journalists, secretaries, cleaners, farm workers, artists—who are working for health-care rights because they’re just like you and you raise your voice with them because you still have a voice and you’re not going down without a fight when there is so much and there are so many for whom to fight…
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