A year ago today my family lost my Aunt Allison to cancer. Her cancer was much, much different than mine--it started in a different place and metastasized before she even knew she had it. Allison was one of my favorite people, ever. She was a mother to three of the MOST FANTASTIC KIDS you could ever hope to meet. One of the last things she and I talked about was my sadness knowing she would not be around to coach me as I raised O...
O & Great Aunt Alli, 9/09
This sad anniversary has got me thinking a lot about "attitude." Since my own diagnosis, many people have offered me words of encouragement regarding my toughness, my ability to "kick cancer's ass," and so on. And while I agree that attitude is important, I also realize that if cancer wants to kick my ass it will and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. NOBODY was tougher than Allison, NOBODY wanted to live more than Allison, and NOBODY had more of a can-do attitude than she did, but metastatic cancer takes NO prisoners and attitude can't help you.
NOW: does attitude help when you're going through chemo and you have a good prognosis for total recovery? YES. No question. Does attitude help on the days you don't want to get out of bed? YES. Absolutely (so does a 2-year-old, as I have mentioned before). So it's not as if I don't understand why people offer those words of encouragement, and I agree that being TOUGH and having a good ATTITUDE certainly can't hurt...
Last night, my Cancer Buddy Ginny (Happy Birthday to her, by the way--the one GOOD thing about today!) sent me links to a few other blogs she found. One of them, http://www.butdoctorihatepink.com/ really spoke to me. The author was diagnosed with a different kind of Stage II breast cancer back in 2009. It was interesting reading her first several posts because in a lot of ways it was like re-reading mine...her path has been different than mine by virtue of her cancer being different than mine, but she did the surgery, she did the chemo and she was "clean." Her ATTITUDE was great, and clearly she is one TOUGH person. In May of this year, though, she was noticing some discomfort and, unfortunately, tests revealed that the cancer had metastasized to her liver. She has moved into the realm of "treatable but not curable" Stage IV cancer. Guh. I'm going to keep reading her blog and I would encourage you to do the same (her most recent post as of today is about something called a "pinc box" and is worth a read and action for sure!)
Kicking around in all of this talk about ATTITUDE and TOUGHNESS is the fact that ESPN is in the midst of their annual "Jimmy V Foundation Auction." (http://www.jimmyv.org/index.php) The foundation is dedicated to the memory of a college basketball coach who lost his own battle with cancer, and all donations go to cancer prevention research (a discussion for another day: cancer prevention vs. cancer cures...) In 1993 he gave a speech that has always brought tears to my eyes when I see/hear it, but on this TOUGH DAY it just seems worth a listen. Check it out (but grab a kleenex first).
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