I'm Starting to Understand Survivor's Remorse

If there's one thing you see as a cancer patient, it's lots of other cancer patients. Part of this is just the fact that if you hang out at a cancer treatment center, as cancer patients tend to do, you're going to see people with cancer. But part of it's also what I think of as the "Model X" effect: you never notice Model X of a car driving around the streets until the minute you buy one at which point all you see is the zillions of Model Xs on the road. Similarly, once you have cancer you start to notice the bald heads and head scarves, and pay a scary amount of attention when people mention this or that acquaintance who's been diagnosed. Suddenly, the world has cancer.

And once you start noticing your fellow members of the cancer club, it's hard not to start running through the comparisons. How much hair does this one have compared to me? How much energy does this one have compared to me? Who else is having this side effect, or that one? How bad do they claim it to be? 

I'm starting to realize that by most of these comparisons, I'm coming out the clear winner. The most frequent response I get from people who haven't seen me for awhile but know I have cancer is, "You look great!" And relatively speaking, I do. I don't look like I'm twenty, but I also don't particularly look like I have cancer. Similarly, while I feel like the cancer is significantly slowing me down, as one woman at work kindly put it, my 75% speed is faster than some people's 100%. And that's probably true, too. 

This weekend I was talking to my neighbor, and realized that he and I have gone through basically the same side effects at the same time, but while mine have registered about a two on a scale of one to ten, he's consistently been up there at ten. So, for example, while I get a superficial thrombowhatever and have to take a daily aspirin, he's got some deep seated clot that has him taking injections of blood thinners twice a day. 

Somehow in the cancer lottery, I seem to have obtained a winning ticket -- as much as having cancer can be considered "winning."

And I get that there's no such thing as "cancer," every person's disease is different, treatment choices are different, blah blah blah, but I have to admit I'm starting to feel a little guilty that my cancer hasn't had as big an impact on me as most every other cancer patient I meet's cancer has seem to have had on them.

Even if I justify it by arguing that it's not the cancer that does the damage, but the chemo, and since I opted for very little and very non-aggressive chemo I got a pass on the horrible side effects, that just brings up the question of why I'm still around. I mean, from the time my Mum let us know that her cancer had returned to the time she passed away was just five months. Even assuming she knew long before she told us, I can't imagine she knew for six months before she told us. And yet here I am eleven months in and I'm certainly not knocking on death's door. I sometimes wonder how many people are out there thinking, "Aren't you dead yet?" 

Nope, and seemingly nowhere close.

It's hardly satisfying, but sometimes all you can say is, life's not fair. And for once, the cards seem to have fallen my way.

Like I say, hardly satisfying -- and certainly not enough to stop the feelings of guilt.