Every Minute of Every Day, a reflection written by a young cancer "survivor", Lisa Fucile. This reflects how we all feel. I am so lucky to have my children raised already, but there are many cancer patients out there who are not so lucky. Read this and share with others. Every Minute of Every Day For those of you who have friends and family going through cancer, and you truly don’t understand what it’s like, let me try and shed a little light on it. Some people live in a bubble. They hear someone has cancer. For ten minutes they’re sad, and then their lives go on. They pretty much think those people’s lives go on as well, or don’t really give them a second thought. Their lives don’t go on. Not in a normal way. From the minute they hear those words, their lives are changed forever. If it’s one of those “nice” little cases of cancer that I hear about, and I wish that was the case for everyone when they hear those words…they may have a little something removed, maybe some pills for a while, and they’re fine. But even they go through all the trials, tribulations and worries. And quite often they go on for years and are just fine. Always with that worry hanging over them, or in the back of their mind, but they go on. They are the lucky ones. That’s what you hope for. But in other cases, it’s different. Every minute of every day is changed when you find out you have cancer. You don’t just go to the doctor’s once in a while, have a long day at the hospital, go home and back to your old self, back to your old life doing your normal things. It baffles me, that ignorant people think this. But this is not the case. Everything in your life has changed. Everything. You don’t have a normal life, you don’t have aspirations, you don’t have a career. Or if you’re lucky enough to still have a career, you don’t have the career choices you once had, all the goals, all the chances to do what you wanted to do. Everything is different. Your future is suddenly ripped away. You can’t get the things done in life that you wanted to. You look at your children and you realize you won’t have the privilege, the honor to watch them grow up, to be their mom as long as you should be. These most important people in your lives that you fight every fight for, that you take every breath for, that you’d do anything for. You should be able to be here to watch them graduate, fall in love, fall out of love, fall back in love, get married, make amazing contributions to the world, help others, have amazing careers, start a family with children of their own (who are your grandchildren), to see that parental love in the eyes of your own children. And all the little things that are actually the big things. Like the day they realize they can do it, the day they look in the mirror and they are happy with themselves, the day they realize they have the power to do anything they want. You’re going to miss all those days. You weren’t asking for the moon, you were just asking to see those days. And you know you won’t. You try to live your life in a good way, you try to be a good, honorable, moral person, you try to do the right things, and in one sentence it’s all gone. You ruin your family member’s lives, you ruin your spouse’s life, you ruin your children’s lives because every minute of every day is eaten up by this disease. You try to make the most of it, you try to have good times, but it’s all tainted, it’s all different. You worry every minute of every day. Of what it’s going to be like for them, for the extra burden you put on them, of the struggles they’re going to have to go through, of the scars they are going to carry around. It’s not fun. And then at the exact same time, you have to fight this disease, every minute of every day. You have to stay strong, you have to keep your body up, you have to keep your emotions up, you have to try and surround yourself with this strong, positive aura and never let a crack form. Because if you do, you’re giving it that inch it needs to win, to get in, to take over and that’s the last thing you want. And I haven’t even talked about going through the chemo. You’re sick. All the time. You have symptoms every day. You don’t tell people about them. People ask how you are, you say, “I’m fine,” and you go on from there. I don’t like talking about myself, I don’t like talking about how I feel, I really don’t think that anyone needs to know the details. When I say I’m fine, I probably have a list of thirty symptoms that I’m feeling. Thirty different things in your body that ache, hurt, don’t work properly, but the last thing you want to do is tell people. You’d bring them down. You don’t want sympathy, you don’t want to talk about yourself. You don’t even want to give cancer any more of your time. But that’s not to say that it’s not really happening, that you don’t feel all these things. The emotional, the physical, the big picture pains, the stresses, the worries, they’re all there. Every minute of every day. And there are people out there that are clueless. Every once in a while they’ll do the politically correct thing. They’ll inquire, usually so they can spread the word to others, show how caring they are, then go on with their petty little lives. They have their silly mundane issues, something so ridiculous that you can’t pretend to care about. You have a ton on your plate. You all know people like this, and honestly none of us have time for that. You have to fight to fight every single minute of every single day. Keep your drama and your pettiness away. Keep your negative energy away. We’ve got to fight the fight. We want to live. They don’t care that we live with the emotional and the physical pain every day, every minute of every day. The sadness, the disappointment, we just want to live. So we keep fighting. So, I write this today for those few people that ask “how are you” and don’t really care five minutes later. I write this to give you a little insight to a horrific life that you would never want, and I pray you never have to deal with yourself. So the next time you see someone who has been dealt a really lousy hand, you might have a little insight to how they really are when they look at you and smile and say “I’m fine.” Every minute of every day. Even as I’m writing this, I had to stop to help my doggie who’s still dealing with having had cancer, to be sick. And what does he do? He throws up. I make him feel better. I clean it up. We cuddle. He wags his tail, gives me a happy face, wags his tail some more and goes on. He’s fine. I want you to remember that the little things in life are actually the big things. The movie that you see previewed at the theater that isn’t due to come out for another year or 6 months or even 3 months. You want to be here next season. You want to take your kids and hubby to that movie, you want to be able to sit back and laugh and say “that was the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen” or “that was the worse movie you have ever picked out and you are the king of bad movies.” And “I couldn’t have been happier than to sit here and watch it with you guys”. The every day stuff, the silly things. That’s what you really want to be doing. Every minute of every day.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 01:26:12 +0000
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