I Am Not Cancer

Many strange things happen when you are diagnosed with the big C. First, you feel like you are ejected from life. Suddenly deadlines don’t matter, jobs are unimportant, and everything you’ve been trying to accomplish drops away. As we drove home for one last visit with my kids before I started chemo, I watched everyone go about their daily lives, getting coffee, going running, buying groceries, and I was no longer a part of that. My life was ripped out from under me. I couldn’t kiss my son goodnight. I could no longer breastfeed my infant daughter. Everything was left unfinished.

Overnight, no one treats you like you anymore. Everyone is extra nice. Family and friends say “I love you” more often, they bring lattes and ice cream, they feed your children, and they even clean your house. This, I realize, is one of the biggest perks of being hospitalized: no more housework.

But as nice as people are, they also look at you like you’re dying. People treat you gently, like you are about to break. No one knows exactly what to say. But it’s ok to make bad jokes and laugh uproariously, even when you have cancer. Especially when you have cancer. Serious illness is scary and terrible and puts death right in your face. We have to laugh or we’ll never make it. Like one of my childhood friends recently said to me: cancer steals from you, no matter what the outcome. And one thing that cancer will try to steal is joy.

Cancer, of course, also steals your hair. (Well, technically it’s chemo that does that, but the end result is the same.) I realize that this may be different for everyone, but I was particularly attached to my long, curly blonde hair. When I started pulling it out in clumps, I sobbed. So I chopped it all off, just like the cancer-stricken heroine in a really dramatic film. Except that once it was all off, instead of crying hysterically, I couldn’t stop giggling. I looked like an electrocuted baby chick.[1] Right in time for Easter.

Then I realized that this is one more thing that cancer tries to steal: your identity. When strangers see your bald head, they think “cancer” before anything else. Instead of seeing you, people see illness. Suddenly, you are "that girl who got cancer," instead of everything else you’ve worked so hard to be. In the hospital you are a patient, put into the same blue gown as everyone else, often reduced to cell counts and prognoses and “unfavourable cytogenetics” (my own personal favourite).

But I am not my prognosis. I am not cancer.

And I don’t wear hospital gowns anymore.

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[1] I must thank Sallie Astor Burdine, author of Who Needs Hair, for this particular image.