A few months ago, I wrote about my first spat with cancer. Naturally, the next week, I followed that blog with a discourse about… biking. One of my fellow bloggers, though he enjoyed the cancer column (as much as one can enjoy a discussion about malignant tumors), was nonplussed:
Isn’t there more to the story?
Yes. But I find that, to do justice to the story, I want to gather my breath again. More importantly, I want to focus on the men and women who guided me through the imbroglios of malignancy. Because any true story about cancer must be about more than the cancer fight, which— after all— is a rather prosaic tale. We move through our lives with silly assumptions about our immortality. Then some of us hear the word “malignant,” feel the knife or the radiation or the chemo. Some of us recover slowly, some of us don’t.
But the quietly powerful stories cluster outside those with cancer, which is why it’s taken me a decade to frame this story: I had to learn that my story isn’t really about me.
A year before I taught Cassandra (no, not her real name), she underwent surgery and chemo. She spent much of her 10th grade riding waves of exhaustion and convalescence as her body healed just enough for her to endure another slope of toxic chemicals. She started my class with a tired smile and a porkpie hat, one which she didn’t remove until the last month of her junior year. Her glossy dark hair coiled about her head.
Teachers and students knew about her bravery. We marveled at her ability to walk into school, the chemicals slowly leaching from her body, the malignancies gone (maybe), the reminders of her mortality with her.
She faces it so well,
we said in our looks and whispers.
The summer after her junior year I argued with cancer for the first time. During my three weeks of radiation, I thought about Cassandra every day, admiring her poise as I lurched toward the toilet. My God— she survived a year of drug cocktails, and I was puking after three days of radiation. She faced the uncertainty of a virulent malignancy, and as long as I could stand the radiation, I faced a strain with lovely survival odds. How could I call myself a cancer victim?
I told her as much when school started again.
She listened as I stumbled over my words, smiling when I had finished. She said,
When I was in the cancer ward, one of my friends talked to me after a rough bout. She said, ‘Remember, we’re fighters. We’re survivors. We’re never victims.’
“Never call yourself a victim,” my former student said to me.
Cassandra gave me the gifts of her poise and her words.
So here is my return gift, only a decade late.
Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.
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February 5th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Thank you.
February 5th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Why do we fight to survive?
February 6th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
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