The Thing Nobody Tells You About Surviving Cancer

There isn’t much to me. I am fairly boring, and I am far less than interesting.

My life can be summed up by a few things: my boyfriend, Netflix, and here’s the biggie — cancer.

Over the past two years, I have come to find that my life revolves around my sickness. I have beat cancer once, only to have it creep back into my body and take over my life once again. That’s the thing about cancer, though. Once you have it, you can never truly escape from it. Surviving cancer might make you see life from a new perspective, make you daring and ‘live like you were dying’ as the popular songs say.

No one ever talks about the ugly side though — the survivor’s guilt, the constant worry of going out of remission. Those are the things we would like to think never happen to a survivor but it’s truly unavoidable. I have spent many nights wide awake, wondering why more important people than I have had their lives shortened by the same disease that constantly plagues me.

I am not a mother. I am not going to dive into a medical field and find the cure for cancer. I am a less than average 20 year old girl who finds joy in nothing besides sitting on the couch and watching TV. I don’t go out and drink, I don’t take adventures, I’m not extraordinary so the question always comes up…. Why did I survive?

My boyfriend is amazing and he is always by my side. He doesn’t talk about his dad often, because his dad was not as lucky as I have been thus far. His dad battled cancer for seven years before finally losing his fight. He was a father and a husband. From what I have heard about him, he was a great person. Why do people like that lose their fight, but I — with no children, no husband, and no goals — survive?

You can ask a very long list of people and they will tell you how unimportant I am to this world. They judge me for the type of person I was in high school, and from the stories and gossip they hear which is probably twisted and mangled so far from the truth. I have had people tell me they wish I died, that the world would be a better place without me, that I keep getting cancer because I am a horrible person. It’s hard not to believe them because as many times as I ask myself, “Why did I have to get cancer again, what did I do to deserve this?”, those people are the only ones providing me with an answer.

The worst part of it all is that I feel completely alone. In reality, I have my entire family and my boyfriend but what really gets to me is that they are all in constant denial, thinking that the situation is better than it actually is. They think I am just overreacting when I don’t feel good, and they think there is a simple solution to making me feel better. There’s not. I will not feel better until this cancer is out of me, and even then I will still not feel better because I will either be dead, or still be depressed.

I live my life waiting for the future. A future I might not ever have. My current life is on hold, like it seems to always be. I can’t find a new job, because by the time I will need surgery I won’t be eligible for Short Term Disability there, like I am at my current job. I can’t get married, because I don’t know when my treatment will start and can’t plan a wedding. I can’t have children, because I am too sick and I am not even sure if I am capable of still having children with my medical history. So I plan my dream wedding and future child’s life out on Pinterest, knowing that I may very well never get the chance to live it out for real. My boyfriend doesn’t understand why I am so wrapped up in the future.

I am wrapped up in the future, because unless I get cancer again after this, the future can’t be any worse than the life I am living now.