"How do you deal with the horrible guilt of knowing you are going to make it and someone else isn't?" was a question posed to me in the last few months. To be honest, there are very few people with whom I have been close that have gone through chemo. Well not that I know of. The closest of those I do know is my mother, who began her chemotherapy as I was ending mine. Only my Team In Training (TNT) teammate Lisa did not make it. As I thought about my answer, I thought of Lisa. I advised the person asking to find a common interest shared between the two and do that for the friend that will not make it. For Lisa, my teammate, I ran. In frustration I ran because that is what we shared. Both participants and fundraisers for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) while going through treatment, we connected through running and our TNT friends.
Now, six months after Lisa passed, I reconsider my response. April 21st 2014, I got my port removed. It was a very emotional day. At times I was elated. So happy that I could be done with that part of my life. Worried that it was all a delusion. That I would wake up still six months from being told I was in remission, and still not knowing if that day would ever come. Time seems to become an irregularity rather than a constant while going through chemo. Some days are blurry and you are not sure they really happen. Some days are fine.
The reality of time has set in and my port is out. I keep feeling my collarbone where I used to be able to feel the tube running from the port to the vein. A slight and squishable bump under the skin but on top of my left collarbone. My chest is still too tender for me to poke and prod though the place where the prongs from my port used to stick up is now only a yellowing bruise around the healing incision line. I kind of feel that part of me is missing like a soldiers amputated limb. Obviously different as I do not want it back; I do not miss it. Still, a part of me seems missing.
Monday, while very emotional, was a very happy day. The next day, April 22nd, my mother started another round of chemo. This one should not be as hard for her as her last round. Even though it is going to be more manageable this time, I still feel for her. And I wondered about that guilt. Worse, that same day my wife and I found out another friend of ours who has been struggling with her own fight, had gotten much worse. She just found out that her cancer had spread to her brain, liver, and a number of other organs. The following day, the 23rd, she passed. Once the cancer spreads, especially to major organs, there is little chance to make it.
I have been racked with guilt since. That I am better, even if my oncologist told me it will come back, and she did not make it. What right do I have to be better? She was married and had children too. She leaves behind a tormented spouse. She was a wonderful person.
How is that fair?
...Knowing full well what it would feel like, I would gladly take a few more years of treatment and suffering if it could let her live.
And I know it wouldn't work. But if- if.
So what can I do, because I cannot allow myself to do nothing. I run. I raise money to fund the research to end cancer. I want to go one step further than curing the disease. I want to prevent it. Team In Training and all the other programs that are a part of the LLS are trying to do the same. But I found solace in TNT. My teammates lift me and inspire me when I am weak or when I want to give up. My shoes are worn out. It hurts to run. I cannot afford to buy new ones right now but I still put on my shoes and run.
I think it is the only way I feel I am paying penance for getting better. I am trying to help pay for my making it when others have not.
I would dearly love for you to help as well. Please take a minute and donate to the LLS to help end cancer. I try to make it as easy as possible for you to do so. There is a donation tool on the side of my page. Just click and donate.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Cancer, not to praise it.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Cancer...
It is time to take up arms against cancer once more. I am not asking for crazy amounts of donations, though I won't turn them away ;), I am only asking that all that read this donate a minimal $10 to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team In Training. All you need to do is click on the donation thingy on the right, and donate $10.
It's that simple!!
If you donate only $10, I will surpass my goal for this season in raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). Money raised by the LLS funds research on groundbreaking new treatments for ALL cancers, it supports patients that need help paying bills, it funds outreach programs... It fights cancer! Please take a moment, donate $10, and feel GREAT because you are helping to fight cancer!
That what Team In Training is all about. Fighting cancer! Well, fighting cancer and being awesome! Those are the two things TNT is all about. Okay, fighting cancer, being awesome, and sweating like crazy as we run and run and run. Those are the three thing TNT is all about. ...but nothing else.
