beat it.

After the guy staged my cancer (3B, as it turned out), he sent me downstairs to get some blood taken for a work-up. I sat where I was told, and stuck my arm out.  Fifty percent.  That's the chance he gave me to make it five years.  Five years, I thought.  In five years, I'd be 31.  Will I ever be 31?  

The woman across the room from me was wearing a tee-shirt that said "Cancer Sucks."  

I have cancer, I thought to myself.  And then I started crying.  Just like that.  Her tee shirt--how did this tee-shirt come to mean anything at all to me, anything more than something that other people say, that other people care about?  But it did.  In that moment, that tee-shirt wasn't just anything, it was everything.  I hated that shirt and I hated her for wearing it and I hated that I hated it.  Because I had to care about it, now.  

So I cried. 

It's good for me to remember these things, because life is stressful.  And some days, when I'm staring down a pile of paperwork, wondering if I'll ever be doing work I really love, and annoyed that everyone in the world just doesn't do exactly what I want them to do, wishing that weight was a little easier to lose, money a little easier to make, faith a little easier to claim...some days, I need to remember something really simple:

Cancer sucks.  But I beat it.  And I will beat all the rest of those things as well, but even if I never do, I beat the cancer.  I am alive.

I am alive.  I am alive.  I am alive.  

(Side bar: that tee-shirt was ugly, and she should throw it away.)