The Weight of Cancer

I haven’t shared my last post on all my social channels. I haven’t broadcast it widely to my colleagues. Even as a treatment plan has come together, I’ve been a lot less vocal about the relapse. Truth is that I don’t even like calling it a relapse. It feels too much like failure. I know it’s not but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t feel that way some times. But I don’t think that’s why I haven’t shared my post far and wide.

I’ve written before on the heaviness of cancer - how it weighs on you and your family, and threatens to add weight to even the lightest of moment. I’ve certainly felt that this last month. As I move further away from the news and closer to the treatment, I’ve been better able to keep the heaviness at bay. But it’s been a burden.

Maybe that’s part of why I’ve resisted sharing this news more actively. I don’t want my lymphoma, my experience to weigh on others. I don’t want to be the heavy that takes the joy out of the room. But more than that. If I’m going out to dinner, or meeting up with friends or colleagues, I don’t want my disease to be the center of attention. I don’t want it to be the focal point of my identity. As I wrote about earlier this year, cancer is so loud, it can drown out all the other parts of you. It can become who you are if you don’t set the rules about when and how you talk about it, and to whom. Maybe that’s part of this whole blog - to set the rules, to wrest control over an uncontrollable situation. I said then, and I’ll repeat it here. I want to be the one who determines how and when I let it take center stage, if at all.

And finally, as this is becoming a look back at what I’ve written kind of post, I’ll note again what I wrote about back in February this year, when the thought of relapse was far from my mind. I quoted MLK, Jr., who said: "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

At some point, my news will travel a little more in my circles, and that’s fine. But for now, I’m okay with a little quiet, and infinite hope.