Through all different types of social media I follow lots of fellow cancer folks, I joined social support groups where others share ideas, ask questions of other people’s experiences with treatments, see pictures of there lives, and very often see the word “survivor”. I love words, especially those really weird ones that we never use anymore like “balter”, and trust me in life BC (before cancer) after a few gins I was an expert balterer... I love books as well and have recently admitted to my friends that my dad once built me a library in our home where I spent a whole summer holiday making library cards for every single book I owned, which was a hell of a lot! This might be the time to point out I was pretty much an awkward child and found most people annoying, with a limited friends group possibly paid for by my mum in cakes and sweets, and I’m really not exaggerating I was bloody awkward and painfully shy, the poor woman seriously worried she had given birth to some personality challenged mute. My older sisters were so loud compared to me I think I was 12 before I got a word in.
Anyway back to that word “survivor”, It reads like someone who has gone through some serious shiz and comes out the other side, maybe not just cancer, but many more of life challenges. Then I realize my cancer has no cure so I’m never going to be a “survivor”, never going to be cancer-free, in remission, no evidence of disease. My cancer is so friggin random a general life expectancy from the point of diagnosis can be anything from 6 months to 40 years!! In that case, will I always be “suffering” from cancer? But I’m not really suffering, yes I have days where the thing takes hold and even getting dressed is too much, and the exhaustion, wow the exhaustion is off the scale when it comes out of nowhere, I have days where I’m alert but need my wheelchair I might be having some extreme pain or breathlessness and then there are days where I’m totally bossing life just needing steve the stick to help me moonwalk my way around life.
So I’m not a “survivor” and I’m not “suffering” from cancer. So what am I? What word can define where I am? How do I describe all of this? What am I????
The point to all this if you are wondering what the hell I’m rattling on about is how much power we put in a word or rather how much power I have put in a word. "Survivor" is not an end goal, its an everyday goal. By surviving we can give ourselves a shiny gold medal every single day, although if you did drop the house on someone maybe just a bronze medal that day. I haven't quite decided what to do with the word "battling", but for me, it is too negative to use with surviving, too much aggression attached, at the end of the day I'm a lover, not a fighter. Then I think of my friends and family that have also had cancer and how many times it was said they "lost their battle". I must say that really pisses me off! It makes it sound like they were not as strong or powerful as others that have heard those words remission or NED, they didn't put in as much of a fight. Trust me when I say the ones I'm thinking of as I write this were some of the strongest, purest, deserving people I was ever lucky enough to have had in my life, no matter how many years that might have been.
There is power in a single word but it is what power we give it ourselves. I'm no guru who can tell people how to live there lives, at the end of the day this is just how I am learning to live and I am certainly doing that every day, living and ......... "Thriving"!!
Namastay safe my friends.
Allana x
