Having cancer was the best thing to happen to me / Anonymous

The story I wanted to talk about, or tell, was the time that I was diagnosed with cancer. Well, let me start from the very beginning. Both my parents died at a pretty young age, in their 60s, which I think is pretty young. Because of that, I said, “I need to go to the doctor and get things checked out.” So I went for a physical and my doctor said, “I feel something in your neck. I’m sure it’s nothing.” So I go follow up with an ultrasound, and I ask the person doing the ultrasound, “Do you see anything?” She goes, “I can’t tell you if I see anything. You’ll have to wait for a doctor.” Then I go back to my doctor and he said, “Well, there are some things that we see in there, and I want you to see a surgeon because we need to check some things out.”

So I go to the other doctor, the surgeon, and they do a biopsy. I go back a week later. It’s just the doctor and me sitting in the room, and the doctor says, “So we found cancer.” I said, “Oh,” and I started to cry. He said, “Well, can you call your parents?” I started to cry harder because my parents were gone. In that moment, I never felt so alone. The doctor said, “I’m sorry.” I said, “My parents are dead.” He said, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what to do. He said, “There’s a phone here. You just press nine to dial out. I’m going to leave you in this room, and you can stay in here as long as you need.”

So there I am, just getting this diagnosis of cancer, with nobody to call. I had no idea. It was a little too early on the West Coast to call my brothers, so I just sat there for a moment. Then I called a coworker and I told her. She’s like, “Are you okay?” I said, “No, I’m not. I don’t know what to do, except I’m going to go back to work.” That’s what I did, I went back to work. A few weeks later, I had surgery and they removed the cancer. I had all kinds of funky side effects after. I went through radiation treatment, and it made me feel so different than I previously had felt about my body, about my place in this world.

I think to grow, you have to go through some pain. I definitely went through that, because it took many years actually for me to get right. It made me more aware of how people see other people, because I had a visible scar. They call it hypertrophic, it’s not a keloid but very similar, it was a raised scar. My doctor said, “Well, we can get some injections for you so it could flatten a little bit.” I said, “Well, okay, I’ll do that.” Because actually, a few months after the surgery I said, “Oh, I’m going to go on a date.” I went on a date with this guy. We met in Central Park.

The first date we had, I was wearing probably a high neck. The second date we had, I was wearing a lower cut thing. At that point, my scar had been pretty raised. He said, “What happened to you?” I said, “Well, I had cancer.” He was like, “Oh,” and he proceeded to be very uncomfortable with me. I never heard from him again after that. So it made me think about my body a lot. I thought about my body a lot. I thought about the way that people view my body. Eventually, I reached a place where I just felt comfortable with it. This is my scar. I’m not ashamed of it. It is what it is.

I’ve had people since ask me what it is. I think that’s a rude thing. You don’t know if I was held by knife point. You should never ask anybody about their scars. But, we all have them. Some peoples are visible and some peoples are not visible. Again, having that experience, going through the surgery, going through the after, having to deal with the after effects of treatment, having to deal with being on medication that wasn’t appropriate for me, and giving me all kinds of things, all these things just made me grateful for this body that I have every single day.

Even when it’s not at its best, I appreciate what it’s done for me, how it keeps me going, how it keeps me living. I started to say, “Having cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” because it made me come alive. It made me not take things for granted, and I don’t. Every single day, I’m grateful for it. Some people aren’t, and they’re just fine. Physically, they might be just fine. But, it’s something I don’t take for granted. That’s the story of my body.