Open Letter to The Rogue Cancer Cells

Dear Cancer,

Believe me, you aren’t dear to me but I am just sticking to literary convention. You have enjoyed the stay in my body, my temple for much too long and have overstayed your welcome. I would like you to pack your stuff (wanted to say another word that also starts with “s”) and leave. My body has better things to do than to fight with your megalomania. There is an exit sign that you are ignoring.

There is a lot that this body needs to accomplish to ever turn itself over to you.You have lodged yourself in a place where I need room to accommodate the love and caring that life has to offer. I need the room vacated so it can be filled with joy and peace and contentment.

I need my energy to so that I can live to see my children grow. My son needs you to leave so he can grow up to be a man but still have a place where his tears are not seen as weakness and his laughter infuses life. My daughter needs you to leave so she is assured that she can be taught all the “girly” things that she needs to learn in life and be all that she needs to be.

I need you to leave so I can grow old with my loving husband. He needs you to leave so he can have his life back. He needs you to go so he doesn’t have to be the mother and father. He needs you to leave so he can lose the anxiety of losing the love of his life.

I think you have been trying to suck the energy out of my existence for far to too long – bit by bit, and piece by piece. You don’t scare me and I can look at your sick crazily mitotic nuclei in the eye and say, “I am not afraid’. I just need to you to leave.

I want you to leave so my friends can rejoice, and my family can breathe freely. I need you to leave so that my patients can rest assured that the one person they feel that truly understands them is still there and they won’t have to start over. They need to heal. I need to heal.

I want you to leave so I can look at those who abandoned me during cancer and say, “Thank you for helping me realize that you never mattered. I won this battle without you!”

I need you to leave, for I have learned all the lessons that I needed to learn after looking at death in the eye. I have learned not to take anything, or anyone for granted. I have learned to take each moment as it comes. To find meaning and hope in every day life. To make things happen and not wait. To be myself and trust myself. To be honest and forthright. To endure.

I have learned the meaning of pain and suffering, that a peaceful night’s sleep is a blessing, being able to digest food is a treat, to be pain-free is a miracle, to feel energetic is a gift, to feel beautiful is an internal feeling and to appreciate life is hard work.

I am ready to move on from the lessons I have learned so I would like you to move on. Leave me alone. And the next chemo, when the Taxol infusion is flowing through my blood, I would like it to find you and tell you so.

It’s time to move on. It’s time to heal. It’s time to recover. It’s time to start over.

Yours(not really!!),

A cancer survivor