Over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve been writing this series, I’ve had to associate myself with the word ‘cancer’ a lot more than I have over the last four years. It hasn’t been comfortable, which I suppose, is a big part of why I’ve felt the need to do it. In person, I talk about the aches and pains, and limitations of my body quite openly. But the actual word feels strange - at my fingertips, and in my voice. There’s something about it being on a page that makes it tangible, in a way that I’m usually able to avoid the weight of.
When I was first diagnosed, I personally informed just a handful of people. Two got emails, one got a snapchat message, the rest got facebook messages. I only actually used my voice to tell my boyfriend and that was over a phone call. I posted a picture on my social media accounts the night before chemo started, and a week or so later, when I was admitted to the hospital for severe dehydration, I posted another, more miserable looking photo with an elaborate caption. It’s sad how much easier it is to make big public declarations than personal, intimate ones. I didn’t ever sit someone down - someone I cared about, who cared about me- and tell them, with my voice, that I had cancer.
My parents and brother were with me, so they were finding things out at the same time that I was. Everyone else who mattered to me, who needed to know, lived somewhere else. I’m not sure whether to think of it as something I was spared or denied. It was a labour that would have drained me even more than I already was, which is hard to imagine. But four years later, this story, that physically carved my body, still feels so intangible.
My parents, brother, and boyfriend did the actual labour of informing people. It was something they were going through as much as I was, and I didn’t particularly care that people knew, so long as I didn’t have to deal with it. I told them they could tell who they wanted, what they wanted, but I refused to talk to anyone. The thought of holding space for someone while they processed this thing that was happening to me just profoundly irritated me.
When I posted the photo on instagram, people reached out, in comments, and messages, and I responded to a small handful. My attention span and patience were short, and I didn’t make any real effort to respond if I didn’t feel like it. And I didn’t feel like doing very much at all.
People came and visited, and I was a bit better about being appreciative of that. If they were coming to visit, they’d had to coordinate things with my parents, so I didn’t have to do any exposition. When I got bored, or tired, or irritated, it was easy enough to end the interaction by saying I needed to sleep. Even if I was in bed, in the hospital room, I could just turn around, and let the other people in the room deal with them.
Today, I’m grateful for paper, for tangible words that I could hold in my hand. One of the first people who came to visit me was a friend whose mother was coming to the end of her treatment for breast cancer. They sent me a book of handmade paper, which I drew, painted and journaled in, throughout chemo. I went back to it during a brief, but intense scare when we thought it was back, and again when I had the surgeries two years later. People sent me letters, and cards by mail. My cousin wrote me notes. Friends who visited left me notes as well. I kept them all taped into the notebook. It wasn’t a new thing, by any means. I’ve kept journals and scrapbooks with momentos, for as long as I can remember. Except this time, instead of following some bizarre urge to preserve my memories, I needed all that to recognize the material reality of circumstances that I’m convinced I remember too vividly.
