My Diamond

August 21st, 2009

From Aug 21, 2009

Yesterday, one of my dearest friends had a surgery that will save her life.

And I?  I was a basketcase.  Cycling through the emotions, I went through grieving for my friend’s loss of her beautiful breasts at twenty-nine years old, feeling extraordinarily grateful to have her in my life, grateful that she chose life, and then feeling excited like a pillar of strength for her throughout the next five or six months worth of battle with chemo.  Repeat.    If I wasn’t tearing up over sadness, I was tearing up with joy. (Being a woman isn’t easy.)

There was a question posed to me as to why I was taking this so personally.  I didn’t have to think long about it… this is happening to me personally.  It’s not just something I can sympathize with, because really, cancer happens to all of us.  There is no one who is not affected by a cancer diagnosis.  It is a costly, potentially deadly disease that makes us stop in our tracks, wondering if there wasn’t something we could have done differently.

There are so many connections between particular carcinogens and their potential for causing cancer that you can’t help but reason through it.  Yet, there’s never a way to really point blame at someone’s past in order to quell the question of, “Why?” when it happens to someone you know.  There is no test that says, “You got cancer because of X, Y, and Z.”

Yes, there are associations.  Yes there are strong possible connections.  But there are also too many variables in a person’s life to definably finger one particular “thing” that caused it.

Maybe you have more of a propensity for breast cancer if you have a certain BRCA gene.  Maybe you’re more apt to have lung cancer if you’re a smoker.  Maybe if you eat fast food and don’t get enough veggies in your diet, you’ll have colon cancer; if you stand in front of a microwave a lot as a kid, then maybe you’re more likely to get a brain tumor… but none of these factors alone can give us, with certainty, an absolute diagnosis of cancer.

These uncertainties beg me to share with you my hypothesis about cancer:  I think there’s a good chance that stress causes most cancer.  I think that stress throws our whole body in a funk, and then along with those funkin’ changes, our cells begin to reproduce prolifically.  The problem with my hypothesis?  There’s no real way to measure stress.  We can measure stress hormones, but every body reacts to stress differently.  Some bodies don’t respond to stress at all, and even the same body with the same stressors at two different periods of time will have a completely different reaction.

Alas, my hypothesis is sucky because it’s entirely impossible to measure.

Back to the point, though.  I am affected by my friend’s breast cancer because cancer can happen to anyone.

I am affected because this is a woman I love dearly, and I can put myself in her shoes long enough to know that this is the last thing that any woman wants to go through.   I love her, and I don’t love watching her go through this– although it must be said that she’s handling this experience with grace and a positive attitude, and she truly IS the person that I believed her to be– and then some.

She is an extraordinary woman, and I wish that everyone had an opportunity to know someone half as cool as her.  (She’s already filled to the gills with friends, so you’ll have to find your own friend like her, she’s taken.) :)

And that being said, she’s done nothing to deserve this disease.  She doesn’t smoke, she’s active, and she’s a kind and loyal friend.  Her heart is as big as the ocean, and I just can’t see that there’s any karmatic potion in place– because nothing she has done in this life could possibly justify deserving this!  Yet, somehow, here she is…

Walking this path with her head held high…

I am affected because this could be any of us.  No one is truly immune to this disease.  No twenty-nine year old should lose their breasts to cancer.  No one.

Yet, in acknowledging that, I’ve come to realize that my experiencing it along with her somehow allows me to be there, fighting this challenge with her.  I think in a lot of ways, this has been my opportunity to really begin to evaluate my priorities.  Through this, I’ve had to come to terms with my own human mortality… the fact that our bodies will not continue forever… well, that’s a big pill to swallow.  I’ve had to really use the facts of death as a board against which I press my feet, fervently stretching my body up and away from it, waving  my flag of survival and flipping the bird down at disease and death.  Instead of fear, now, though, it has become a matter of choice.  She chooses not to die.  That gives us some sort of control.  And somehow that control allows us to take on whatever fighting attitude we need in order to harness our own power over what happens in this life.

Not only have I come to terms with mortality, but this has given me a prime opportunity to understand just how important some pharmaceuticals really are to our survival.  Western medicine is not all bad.  It’s not the devil.  It has its place in our wellness.  I’m still no advocate for psychiatric pharms for children, but reminding myself just how important some medical advancements are in our well-being is important, too.

It almost makes me want to continue to pursue medical school again.  (Of course, then I remember that the pediatric neurosurgeon I work for will sleep on the floor of his office when he’s on call here, and those dreams again fizzle like smoke into the sunset.)

I guess what it really comes down to is that I want my friend to know she’s not going through this alone.   Though much of the treatment is only in the beginning stages, it’s important to me that she doesn’t feel like she is going through an experience that alienates her away from those who love her.

Lastly, I’m actually strangely thankful that I have been witness to this experience.  I’m not thankful that my friend has cancer, but I’m thankful that I know her, and have known her, and am watching this amazing woman walk with her head held high and both feet confidently grounded into the floor.

Who we are today is never the same as who we will be tomorrow, but I think that a traumatic/dramatic illness is one that forces the changes to happen more quickly.  And much like diamonds, I think it’s those of us who can withstand the pressure that come out more beautiful than we were when we went into the challenge.