What did you do yesterday?
I ask because I’m humbled and almost ashamed. I sat on my ass all day, studying, at the library, then came home, ate dinner, and sat on my ass in my room, and studied some more for Monday’s homeostatics exam. (I thought I knew a lot about respiratory physiology, HAH!)
So, yesterday, while you and I were on our largest skeletal muscles (are they? I think they are) my friend Jen was walking hers OFF. She walked 20 MILES in order to raise money and awareness to help find a cure for breast cancer. And here’s the sick part—she’s going to do it again today, and tomorrow!!!
When I was a kid, I did three walk-a-thons for muscular dystrophy. I went door to door to get my neighbors to sponsor me (ten cents a mile…can you believe? TWO lousy bucks for the whole 20 miles? and then had trouble collecting AFTER the walk…don’t get me started!)
My best friend, Heidi, and I walked a 32 km (20 mile) circuit around San Francisco. At one point, we were so tired and delirious we took our shoes off and walked barefoot on the great highway, along the coast. You ache SO DAMNED MUCH, you hurt SO BAD, and yet you can’t stop putting one foot in front of the next…I know what walking 20 miles feels like to a pre-teen, I don’t know what it feels like to do it as an adult, and to do it THREE DAYS IN A ROW!!! I tell you—this is the epitome of self-sacrifice. Jen is an amazing lady.
I wish I could be there when she’s walking into these check-point cheering stations…her stamina and courage give me inspiration to do well in school—people are out there, doing things, raising money and sacrificing of their own time and bodies so that there can someday be an end to this bullshit called cancer. So that someday, someone else’s life won’t be derailed like mine was.
I hope that in my lifetime, no one ever has to be on the other end of the telephone, listening to a pathology report, and hearing the words “you have cancer” ever, ever again. Because, as much as you think you’ve been through some rough shit in your life (believe me, I did think I had been) you are never going to know the depths of HELL like you are once you hear those words.
“My own fucking body is the enemy. I can’t run away from this one” that’s what goes through your mind for a whole year. You lay awake, and think you can almost hear little cancer cells inside you going “we’re going to kill you, nya-nya-nya.” You try to be brave, whatever THAT means, and think about the good fight—chemo, radiation, drugs…sure, you’ll do it, because you HAVE to, not because you’re BRAVE…because you HAVE to.
You think to yourself—my alternatives to this treatment are what? One final swim in the ocean? One heart-felt sprint and then attempt to fly off a tall building? What?
Nothing, that’s what. You put your head down, you cry, and you show up and bare your arm for the infusion nurse to stick poison in your arm that’s going to make you sicker than you’ve ever been…shit that’s going to hurt GOOD cells, as well as bad cells. They take you to the brink of death, kill everything in sight, in hopes of getting all the cancer cells…all of them. Like swallowing a nuclear bomb, or an internal napalm.
The lining of your stomach, your mouth, your esophagus—everything you swallow feels like shards of fucking glass. Your blood—that’s all cells, buddy! Have you ever walked up 5 or 10 steps and been so winded you nearly black out? That’s what happens when you have no red blood cells to carry oxygen to your head, heart, and lungs…
You don’t know about your reproductive organs, because you can’t feel those normally, but you KNOW that somewhere in your ovaries, or your testicles, if you’re a guy, all those little DNA that might have one day been “Junior” are singing a swan song—goodbye cruel world. Your hair doesn’t like the chemo, your eyelashes, your eyebrows, your pubic hair, your armpit hair…you walk around looking like a department store mannequin with nothing on.
But I’m alive, you tell yourself…maybe not in the moment, because, the moment absolutely sucks. “I will be alive” is more accurate of what you’re thinking and feeling. You keep telling yourself that spring is coming, and your hair will grow back, and it won’t be so cold, and one day you won’t feel like this anymore…one day, you’ll be back to studying in some over-air conditioned library, and worried about tests, or paying tuition…stupid shit like parking tickets, and taxes.
Jen is walking 20 miles today, so that maybe someday, someone else won’t have to go through what I did last year.
If you haven’t already, please click on this link to donate any sum, no amount is too small, or repost this link to wherever you might…email it, even…maybe someone you know is willing to forego that cup of coffee today, or lunch, and help bring an end to breast cancer.
To those of you that already have, thank you so much!
http://www.the3day.org/site/TR?px=1636513&fr_id=1299&pg=personal
