It's been a pretty quiet Sunday, I'm in Florida so it doesn't really feel like Labor Day weekend...nothing that suggest it's the end of summer, probably because it's always summer here.
One of the biggest changes in my life after cancer(we'll call it AC), is that I've become "Aware". I'm more in tune with what's going on around me, be it people, places, or things. Today as I was peaking out of my window (I do that often...I guess you could call me a nosey neighbor) there seemed to be an unusual amount of kids playing outside. Again, this might have been normal activity for them...but as I said earlier I've become a lot more aware. Hearing the laughter and fun made me think back to when I was a kid. When my biggest concern was what I would wear to school the next day or if my BFF(Best Friend Forever)would have a nice long juicy note for me to read during band:)
The carefree sound of children playing also brought me back to a conversation I had earlier with a fellow survivor who just completed chemo and radiation for breast cancer. She's fighting the biggest fight of her life while working and raising three kids on her own. I won't go into intimate details about her journey, but I will say this...it was determined by her and her doctor that she needed to take a little time off of work to re-coup after chemo for health reasons. For those of you that don't know, chemo is used to kill all of the bad cancer cells in your body. Unfortunately the chemo doesn't know the difference between a healthy cell and a bad cell, so it ends up killing all of your cells. The wear and tear on your body is intense. You're being flushed with deadly toxin's weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly depending on your diagnosis. For my friend, a doctor's note wasn't good enough for her employer. They require additional testing so that they can determine if she's eligible for short term disability.
Rounds and rounds of chemo, radiation, scans, blood work...aren't good enough for them. They want more. How much more can she deliver? Isn't a diagnosis of BREAST CANCER enough? You work hard all of your life so that you are prepared for and okay when something like cancer happens to you. Why should you have to deal with the stress of trying to figure out how you're going to make ends meet while fighting for your life? It makes me so angry that people all over the country are fighting the same battle while carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. STRESS is the one thing that you should avoid when fighting any illness and for many people including my friend, it's unavoidable. Half of the battle against cancer is a positive spirit and outlook, how do we achieve that when BS gets in our way?
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