15th
Hospitalized
The weirdness of an individual cancer experience is what gets me.
Perversely, you can enjoy it, as I did, because Hodgkin’s itself can be a relief compared to the effect of what Hodgkin’s caused.
Or your humility can be so disarming that it’s very public and very heroic (Jon Lester is pitching right now for the Red Sox as I type this).
Or you can lash out with 100% weirdness and somehow still have your lashing out make a wee bit of sympathetic sense, as an attendee did at a recent young-adults-with-cancer conference when he blamed every female stranger in the room for “lesions on my penis, caused by the male version of the human papilloma virus, given to me by my ex, and I’d like to know if you get tested regularly for HPV and why wouldn’t you tell your partner if you knew you had it?”
I won’t linger on that. But like that attendee, I can’t get out of the confines of my own story’s weirdness, and I think every cancer experience is so unique, at some point every patient feels isolated.
My cancer story was weird because of the memory loss. My fiancee and family had to deal with my week-plus in the hospital, while I, because of my short-term memory loss, only remember the the very last phrase uttered in the hospital: “Good news, we’re sending you home.” I went from someone with good brains—and a good memory in particular—to someone who needs to use Remember the Milk for nearly everything, not because my memory hasn’t fully come back but because I can’t bring myself to trust my memory anymore, and neither can people around me.
And for some reason, now that I have a clean PET scan (last week, officially) and a clean MRI (today, officially), I’m uptight. The weirdness doesn’t end. I didn’t expect that at all.
I’m impatient at work, as nothing in the office seems quite as important as it did when I felt like a badass, missing only a day or two for each time at chemo. I feel indebted, not just in the thankful way but in the crushing-weight-of-credit-card-debt way, to everyone around me—from my father who moved in with us for months, to the friends that flew into town for an end-of-chemo party, to my H.R. rep, to my doctors—because I have no satisfactory way to repay them.
So as someone who’s officially cancer free, I’m surprised to find out the dominant emotion of early survivorship, in my case, isn’t joy. It’s frustration. A rational frustration maybe: slowly coming to terms with the fact that I wasn’t in control of my fate, that I got blindsided by a freak cancer and saved by my own hand only insofar as I held a job with good health insurance. And slowly coming to terms with my subsequent good fortune, weird in its own right.
Many people wiser than I am, more eloquent than I am, have said that you’re in control not of what happens to you but in how you react to those events. I’m not convinced I have the wherewithal to be a strong advocate for young adults with cancer—despite my profound memory loss early on, there are still things I’m trying to forget, like the sound of an MRI machine or the sting of dacarbazine—which is reason all the more to support those beautiful, strong people who do advocate, whether they’re with SeventyK, I’m Too Young for This, a hospital, a clinic, or a family down the block.
Andrew Whitacre is a 28-year-old cancer survivor from the Boston area. Though he can’t remember doing so, he used his blog to update friends and family during his hospitalization in July 2007.
