Earlier this week, someone going through cancer told me that she was tired of the medication. It caused all these aches, fatigue, and all the thing things. The typical regimen is to be on this medication for at least five years. She had heard from her support that someone had finished the five years and then two years after that, she got cancer again. Over the phone, this someone said, “What’s the point if it’s going to show up?”
Maybe if I hadn’t been diagnosed, I might have tried to correct her. Like why would you do that kind of thing? Why would you take a chance on your life? And why would you stop a medication that’s meant to save her life? Especially since she hadn’t been on it more than a year? Why didn’t she work with her doctors to figure something else out?
But along this journey, as they like to say, I have also learned that some people just want to met where they are. They are in pain and I don’t mean literally the pain that is seen as shooting or burning. It’s the pain of living. The pain of not being able to do what you want to do. The pain that means that you stay at home all the time. The pain that you’re missing out. The pain that you’re no longer yourself anymore.
She wanted to return and so there she was.
I say to many people, “But I have so much to do. So that’s why this isn’t the end.”
On the way back in the Uber today, I asked Chris what that word was. It wasn’t stubborn. Then there it was. Nihilistic. That there was no point. The phrase “Why don’t you just kill yourself” then is that same feeling.
But didn’t she have so much she has to do? That life had so much to offer?
But I guess that’s what this feeling is all about.
I felt it yesterday as I laid in bed. All these treatments, they’re exhausting. All this side effects. All this nutrition things. All of this is robbing everything that I enjoy. But it’s all a generalization I know. I don’t know if I want to eat greens all day. I want to enjoy the things that i have. And yet, what really matters to me? It certainly isn’t the food. The food just makes life more enjoyable. But the consuming of it isn’t the reason I live.
Partly because I already had so much of the joy already and I have already gotten jaded about it.