March 2003 Issue - Essay # 9
Living
With Cancer Isn't the End of the World
By Jennifer
Oxford Tirey
And
then I cried for about a week, all the time I cried.
My husband cried, too, and he cried when I didn’t want him to
cry, when I wanted him to tell me to suck it up; but he didn’t that
first week, and now I realize after much selfish behavior that he found
out he had cancer, too, that day in June, as did my mom, dad, sister,
in-laws--the whole family. The
person with cancer sometimes has it all fucked up from the beginning.
And I mean "it" as in "what am I supposed to be
feeling" and "how is this affecting me and my life?"
I’ll
admit that is what I thought of for quite some time, even as my husband
stood beside me everyday and stopped eating and sleeping in any kind of
normal pattern. You get so
wrapped up in the whole thing that you don’t realize that your loved
one started pulling his belt tighter to keep his pants up or that his
eyes started to sadden and weigh heavy, day after day.
Or that your mom’s brick house attitude of positivism could be
at all false or the best way she could deal with the situation.
Always believing the glass is half full, never half empty, keeps my
mom plugging along day after day when she knows deep down that her body
is healthier than her 25 year old daughter and if only she could trade
places with her daughter everything would be okay.
It is kind of like that scene from "Steel Magnolias" when Sally
Field’s character looks to her friends and says of her deceased
daughter, "I could run to Texas and back but Shelby couldn’t."
You never think that could really happen, but it does, and I
actually begin to envy my mom for her energy and ability to always be
positive. Or is she positive for me and breaking down when she is alone?
Living
with cancer brings out a lot of different characteristics in yourself
that you never know are there. Family
members and friends say I am strong, surprisingly strong?
What does that mean? I’ll
admit, sometimes I don’t feel like a fighter--I feel like an avoider.
Does that make sense? By
avoiding the big questions (Will I make it through this? Will I die?),
I get through the days. I don’t live my days in the perspective that I could die from
cancer. I don’t think
about it. Is this wrong or
unhealthy? I would say, no, it
is how I deal with it and only I deal with it.
But this avoidance mechanism that I use to get through this
cancer--does it provide a false shield of strength to my family and
friends, or do they know? I
think my husband knows because I actually took the avoidance strategy
too far in the beginning. I
avoided everything--what the
doctors were saying, what the books were saying. I didn’t want to know
anything about my cancer, and I certainly didn’t want to hear about
anyone else's experience with cancer.
My husband would be reading message board after message board, and
I would be looking into a new career or surfing the internet for new
craft ideas. This
really began to weigh on our relationship and finally my husband just
put it all out there and challenged me to take an active part in my
cancer recovery. But don’t
think that this was an immediate full-circle realization for me.
I still don’t read message boards, but I did start learning
about my cancer, my treatment, and I started thinking of others around
me. Now,
I try to think before I start to immediately complain or belly-ache
every time I am tired or feel a little icky.
Don’t get me wrong, I still tell my husband when I feel bad but
there is a difference between reporting a condition and just bitching
and whining all the time. Last
Father’s Day will always be remembered as the day I found the lump.
My husband and I were doing one of our many home improvement
projects when I heard a radio commercial telling the public to get all
suspicious lumps checked out.
Well,
I heard it and remembered it--thank God.
Later that evening, we were watching television and I was feeling around on my neck. I felt a lump and told my husband about it and made him feel it. But, you see, one thing I forgot to mention: I'm a hypochondriac about things, so this wasn't the first time I’d approached him about something. However, this time he agreed that he felt something, which shocked me. Usually, the response was, "Honey, you are overreacting." So, we both agreed there was a lump, and since my gynecologist appointment had been re-scheduled for the next day, why not mention it? That was all that was said that evening and out of my mind it went. Until
Monday, when I nonchalantly mentioned the lump when my doctor asked if
there is anything else bothering me today. Once again let me add that my
doctor is a resident that has also been privy to my hypochondriac
behavior. She even refers to
me as her "hypochondriac patient."
So, when I told her about the lump I still figured that this was nothing to worry about.
She knew that I wouldn't just get the lump out of my mind so she
felt it. She wasn't too
concerned about the lump I found last night--she was more concerned about
the bigger one in front of it that my husband or I had never noticed. Now this
concerned me, but she was very reassuring, “Probably nothing,
antibiotics should clear it up but just to be safe let’s run some
tests." Ultrasound, chest x-ray, blood tests--the whole nine yards.
I was beginning to get scared but--the great doctor she is--she continued to
reassure me even when she had to seek a second opinion from another doctor
to get my tests ordered. It
seemed that the doctor she had to get her final approval from wanted to
send me home with an antibiotic prescription and see what happened.
But, bless her heart, she had a hunch and fought for me to get the
tests. You see, after I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s my doctor admitted that she had a feeling that I had it but didn’t want to frighten me. Can you believe it? The girl essentially saved my life, and I owe her big time. All I could say was 'thank you' and tell her she had most definitely found her calling in life! So,
now we moved on to dealing with family, friends, co-workers. This was a
new experience, too, and I am still working on this one.
It has been almost five months since I was diagnosed and in the
beginning, I was getting cards in the mail everyday--it was like I had a
birthday everyday for an entire month.
The cards filled our living room and we were running out of table
space; so after seeing all the dust collecting we decided to put them all
on the back of our front door. We
both decided the cards gave me inspiration and that they should stay up
until the treatments are all over, which if all goes well is less than
two months away. The
thing I hate to say is that the cards stopped coming as often, and now
they are few and far between. It
isn’t a bad thing--it just makes me realize that everyone has busy
lives and, unfortunately, cancer doesn’t go away overnight, but the
support of friends may feel like it has lessened or even disappeared in
some cases. While you still have cancer your loved ones, friends, and
co-workers sort of move on. You
can’t be mad at them even if you want to, and I always remember what my
husband said to me one day when I told him it felt like people weren’t
concerned as much because I didn’t hear from them as often.
He said, "Put yourself in their position and tell me how long
you would keep up with a friend when you have your own busy life to
contend to?" Well, of
course, I wanted to say and I think I did, that I would be there until
the end and never let up but then I started wondering to myself what
kind of friend would I really be if someone else had cancer and not me?
I would hope I could
be there but would I? And that made me realize that I shouldn’t think that way anymore but focus on the positives of my friendships and appreciate everyone who had thought of me and prayed for me. Appreciate the friends that know when every one of my chemotherapy dates are and call to check on me all the time, and my family that constantly provides a pillar of strength to me even when I am so tired of hearing, "Just four more treatments left, you can do it!" Or when a family member refers to them going through it too, "We are almost done with the chemo." Believe me, I want to say there is no "we" in the equation--only me, myself and I go through the awful ordeal of being poked and pricked trying to get an IV line set up but I can’t think that way. If cancer has taught me anything it is that there is not one person who has cancer. Everyone around you feels the side-effects in ways that are even harsher than to the person with cancer at times. |
| Author's Biography Jennifer Oxford Tirey was born in Southern Illinois and grew up in the small town of DuQuoin with her parents, Jim and Debbie Oxford, and her younger sister, Jaime. After
graduating from high school, Tirey moved to Charleston, Illinois, to
complete her Bachelor's of Arts Degree in Political Science at Eastern
Illinois University. During
her senior year at Eastern, she began volunteering for a local
democratic state representative race and became a full-time employee
after graduating. After
the election, she began a one-year legislative internship for the
Illinois House of Representatives in Springfield and worked for the
Speaker of the House, Michael J. Madigan. Currently, Tirey continues to work for the Speaker of the House as the Legislative Coordinator for the Issues Development Staff in Springfield, where she lives with her husband, Kevin. Tirey enjoys reading, painting, riding her bicycle and tackling home improvement projects with her husband.
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