A number of friends have asked me how I reacted when I found out that I had leukemia. I'm not talking about the moments when I thought I had something or other, or when the doctors told me that it was "something in my bones," before I called home. They wanted to know what I did after Dr. Gorst sat on the edge of my hospital bed in Lancaster and told me, explicitly, that I had a "rare, acute leukemia." When he used the words for the first time I didn't even know how to spell them. Acute myelogenous leukemia. I mangled the words then; now I can spell them in my sleep.
One of my mother's friends approached me at a party, maybe a year after I left the hospital for good. It was a big family barbecue. There were hamburgers and hotdogs and beer and chips and little carrot slices on white platters. We filled ourselves on appetizers and weren't hungry for the main course. Most people were milling about the back yard, grabbing beers from the cooler, threatening to spray our cat with the hose. I went inside to change the CD when this friend of my mother's stopped me. She had been drinking all afternoon. It was hot outside and my head throbbed.
She asked me if I ever thought that I was going to die. Out of the blue, no preface to the question. It surprised me. I told her no, I never thought that. It never crossed my mind. Death was not an option.
She told me that I must have. How could I not? Things were so bad. I was hanging by a thread for so long. How could I not have thought I might die?
And maybe it's because she has never had leukemia that she can't understand. Maybe it was because I'm more optimistic than she is. I don't know. It angered me that she would try to tell me what I was or was not thinking. My mother did it to me once, also during that summer, when she tried to tell me how I should react to leukemia. She said the same to my sister, two some years ago, and we both agreed that it was none of her business how we dealt with leukemia. I told my mother's friend, again, that dying never occurred to me. Twenty years old is not the time to die. Period. End of discussion.
She continued to disagree with me; at one point, she actually told me that I must have, at some time or another, entertained the notion. Didn't I ever think it might happen? What about when I first found out? What about then?
It got to be so frustrating that I had to laugh. Sometimes people saw the word "cancer" like it was a death sentence. They assumed that I would see it the same way. They saw the hair loss and the vomiting. This friend of my mother's saw me when I was on antibiotics, after the brain surgery, listless and pale on the living room couch. They would dwell on the negatives too much. It got so they couldn't see anything but the negative aspects of leukemia.
After Dr. Gorst gently closed the door, leaving me alone with my cancer, I reached into my backpack for a pen and something to write on. I'd left my journal back on my desk, so I settled for a piece of notebook paper. This is what I wrote:
28 Feb 1990
Some thoughts: people have been asking me one question over and over: how do you feel? They want to know how I'm dealing with the knowledge that I've got a malignant disease -- a cancer -- and that I very well could DIE from it, if not treated carefully. I don't know. I'm still shaping my opinions, but they basically boil down to one analogy.
It's as if a small boy squats down, in the summer, to look at a beetle walking by. With one casual tip of his forefinger, the boy flips the beetle onto it's back. He walks away, laughing. Perhap's he's going to get a magnifying glass. I don't know. The point is, what does the beetle do? Does he lay on his back, slowly blistering in the sun, thinking "Gee, that's not really fair," or "Damn it, why me, why not the next beetle? Why me?" or even "No. This isn't happening. This can't be happening."
You can be damn sure none of those thoughts enter his meager little brain. What he does is start kicking and rocking and flailing, doing everything in his power just to survive. To me, that's all that matters: getting well. I've got leukaemia (sic), and I'm certainly not happy about it, but I've got a future to think of.
There will be no crying over spilled milk, only a voice in the kitchen saying "could you toss me a rag, please? I've got a real mess to clean up."
Oh, sometimes I envied my sister that. Even though she had cancer, her thoughts were her own. She could choose to struggle or not. With depression, it takes your thoughts. It stuffs you down in a well and makes you mute and takes your will to struggle.
So you wait. Mostly you are too tired to take your own life...but you think about it too much.
I once called a suicide hotline at 3 am. I crawled from my bed and dialed this number that I had scrawled on the back of my address book "just in case." They put me on hold. I laughed so hard that, after 5 minutes, I was too impatient to wait anymore and felt like I couldn't explain my laughter to the counselor anyway. So, I hung up. The irony!
The conversation with your mother's friend reminded me of a passage from the book, "Undercurrents" by Martha Manning. A friend tells her that accepting shock therapy was a cop-out. That she didn't "try" hard enough. Manning wants to scream, "Shut up! Shut up! Until you've been to my corner of Hell and back, don't start giving me directions!"
It's not so mysterious, the drama seekers. In voicing their questions, they are voicing their own fears of the dark.