From the ArcaMax Publishing, Susan Estrich Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/susanestrich/s-373089-218044
It was the headline you never wanted to see. For nearly two years, I
have started my day by checking in on Leroy Sievers to see how he is
doing. His "My Cancer" blog on npr.com has become a family of sorts
for people living with cancer, for people taking care of family and
friends with cancer, and for anyone who has been touched by the
disease or who hasn't.
For two years, since Leroy started writing about the unexpected and
awful recurrence of his colon cancer, his blog family has followed the
ups and downs of spinal surgery and chemo and radiation therapy, for
which pain meds work but cause more problems than they solve. On days
when Leroy has been too sick to blog, his partner, Laurie, takes a
turn, or his old friend and colleague Ted Koppel keeps us up to date
on his progress. It's been going on for so long that you start to take
it for granted, or at least I did, that Leroy will be there, will be
back, will be holding this family together.
On June 9, he wrote the headline none of us wanted to see. I knew he
was going for scans on June 6 -- that was "Scan Day, Yet Again." I
always get nervous when Leroy has a scan on Friday and the rest of us
have to wait through the weekend to see how it goes. It had been five
or six months of dealing with issues relating to his spine, of
surgery, of getting in and out of the chair and getting back to
walking. Weird how you get used to that. When my friend Judy had lung
cancer, we went through a long stretch where we dealt with her blood
clots and her leg and the amputation of her leg. It felt like such a
triumph that summer when she would leave me and her leg on the beach
and go for a long swim that I almost forgot about the cancer. Until it
came roaring back. Like Leroy's.
"I have three new tumors in my brain," he wrote that day. "The cancer
has fractured part of my pelvic bone, which would explain the pain
I've felt for so long. New tumors in my liver, which had been clear up
until now. Lungs, ribs, shoulder blade."
What can be done? Not much. Get your affairs in order. Deal with the
pain. Eat cupcakes and cookies with the people you love. That's what
Leroy's been writing about lately. I spent a lot of time doing that
with Judy.
Cancer is a sneaky bastard. Just when you think you've found a way to
live with it, made your peace with it, adjusted to the new normal --
awful though it might be -- it comes roaring back. It's not a fight,
at least not a fair one. If it were a fair fight, Leroy would have won
it, and so would my friend Judy, who swam with such gusto in the
waters of Cape Cod, while I shivered on the beach waiting to wade in
and give her "the leg" when she finished. But it doesn't work that
way. It's not about how hard you fight, how tough you are, how much
you love life or give to others. It is what it is.
Maybe Leroy can keep the cancer at bay. You hear those stories all the
time, about people with tumors everywhere who manage to survive, defy
the odds and the doctors and all of that. As my sister taught me many
years ago when she was fighting cancer for the first time, the numbers
don't really matter; they're about other people, not about you. I keep
thinking that as I wake up each day to see how Leroy is.
Whatever happens, though, I am grateful for the gift he has given, the
gift he keeps giving us every day -- for teaching me to worry less
about the small things that come up, to be grateful for what I so
easily take for granted, for teaching us not how to die, but how to
live.
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To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate website at www.creators.com.