Cancer sucks. It sucks out loud. It sucks quietly in the corner, unnoticed until it’s too late to shut it up. Of all the horrific calamities that might befall a human being it stings the deepest and devastates unabashedly.
Sure, there are other diseases and tragic circumstances that can happen to anyone at any time. But the heartbreak of cancer, the winner take all, fuck you and the horse you rode in on element that makes cancer the number one unnecessary evil in this life is its flagrant exploitation of hope.
This disease has dominated my life in the form of an obscene, smirking bandit ransoming the people I love the most – then running off with every last penny leaving only corpses in its wake. It has no mercy, not even for a baby.
Metaphors like treating a bullet wound with a band aid or fighting an inferno with a squirt gun come to mind when contemplating the demonic mutation that is cancer.
So what can you do? It’s your only life. You fight because you have to. You buy into the medical bull shit three card Monty shell game and play. You pray. You bargain. Tears become a part of your personality. When you finally reach the arch of the journey and see nothing on the other side you still fight. And no one ever has the balls to tell you not to. Not family. Certainly not doctors, who will pump the same toxic poison into a thousand people and get the same result – death – yet will gladly inject person 1,001 in the “hope” of a positive outcome. It is madness unequaled. Fairness is not part of its realm, only sacrifice. Charles Bukowski said it best. On his grave stone is simply written: Don’t try.
Today I learned of another gambler who lost her fight. She tried.
Bon jour mon ami,
