Another Loss

The way you are stripped of your dignity and so much of your humanity in the process of dealing with cancer is insidious. It hits you in the face and then sneaks up from behind and keeps slapping you upside the head. It is discouraging and demoralizing.

In the midst of it all I recognize it is important to try to keep a positive outlook and focus on the good. Attempting to do this in an authentic way is a true challenge. Today I had to go to see a dermatologist because of the fiery skin rash the chemo caused. When did my life get reduced to waiting in doctor's offices and feeling like a piece of meat?

My hair has begun to fall out and it's disappearing fast. So now cancer is no longer an invisible malady but a sign I wear literally on my head announcing to all the world around that I am a cancer patient. One of the few things I've always been so grateful for, my beautiful thick hair, is gone and may never return as I know it.

Cancer treatment has made it impossible for me to spend time in the sun, to garden, to swim in the lake in the heat of the day. Impossible to eat the foods I love, to enjoy a day without pain. There are no easy platitudes to all this loss, I am being stripped naked. Left with very little of me and grateful that in the eyes of those that love me I somehow retain some element of beauty, some remnant of what is good about me.

Cancer doesn't define me, but it has managed to desecrate much of how I recognize myself. Is this a good thing in the end? Time will tell. Today it just hurts.