Surrender

Surrender

by Shafeenaaz on Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 12:12am

I actually walked in through the door in a happy mood today.  I was on a mission.  I completeted the maid's work by cleaning the bathroom and hoovering the carpet, then washed my hair, ironed my clothes, packed my picnic bag and went an on errand, all in less then 3 hours!

After dinner I set out on another mission: to reply to as many pending emails, smss, requests etc. as I possibly could.  I was still on a high then and it was only 8 pm.

Then a friend called.  She is a new friend in the sense that she appeared on my scene some 6 months ago when my mom had her bypass surgery.  She was sharing some Ca news.  Not hers, but of her son-in-law.  And I felt something literally drop inside of me...

No. No. No. I was saying inside myself all the while trying to reassure her that all will be well.  We spoke for some 1.5 hours.


Would anyone understand if I said that her Ca news has saddened me more than my own impending chemo?  That this piece of news has left me like a deflated balloon? 


I could sense there will be crushed dreams somewhere. I could feel that the days and months to come would mean hardship for that family, worries of the nail-biting type, insomnia of the paranoic type, smiles of the wan type...I hope to God that I am wrong.

Having any form of cancer is tough but having cancer when you have dreams is even tougher.  It robs you of choices.  It does not kill hope but it puts out the flames of hope, leaving only faint flickers of hope.

Cancer is a scary thing to live with or live through.  Just look in the eyes of cancer "survivors".  I've looked closely in the eyes of one such person lately and while her words were encouragement piled upon encouragement, I saw a fear there, even an understanding that yes, I may have won this round, but we both know who the master is here.

That's why we are never irreverant to our cancers....we may get angry and swear, we dish out profanities,we kick and scream, we cry and we despair but at the end of the day, we submissively let the scalpel cut, shorten, even disfigure and mutilate, we passively lie down for hours welcoming the chemicals in through our veins, we allow the radiation to sizzle through layers of our precious skins.

We submit.  We relinquish. We surrender.