Counting my blessings

When Cancer enters your life, no matter how strong you are, your life inevitably changes. No matter what statistics are thrown your way, no matter if the Doc you trust tell you it is the 'best' cancer to have, no matter if your alternative medicine doctor reiterates that 'this' cancer responds well to the poisoning of chemotherapy, no matter if your astrologist friend who has always been bang on comforts you by saying it is a bad patch but you will come out of it - the worst months are still to come - the reality of dying stares you in the face as never before. For whatever reason Cancer is always associated with words like remission, abeyance etc. Your life changes because you realise your own ephemerality, more so if you are in your seventh decade. This is bound to happen. There are several ways of handling this brutal realisation.

Life is a death sentence writes writes Oriana Fallaci in her letter to a child never born, a book that touched me profoundly. Being born has only one certainty and that is you will die. But when the going is good everyone forgets this inevitability. We humans fall prey to hubris far too often. Cancer is a sure way of bringing you back to earth. As I have oft repeated in this blog, so please forgive my rambling iterations, I have encountered cancer three times in my adult life. The first time we chose to ignore it and look the other way. The second time I fell hook line and sinker for the then available medical treatment but never reached stage 2 of the said treatment. This time not only do I want to face it with all the arsenal available, even ludicrous ones like jumping on a trampoline, but I also want to deny it of all the space it usually hogs, and consign it to a tiny corner of our lives.

I want to demystify it and find all the positive that it does and can entail if we look at it in the correct perspective. True I would never say this if it was a child or a young person who was afflicted. I am talking about those who have passed the prime of our lives and are in our twilight years, when every extra minute you get is a blessing. When my mother was asked why she refused treatment she simply said I have lived my life. What she meant was that she had seen her child grow, succeed, marry, have children and so on. My take is a little different.

Cancer that comes into your life at a later stage and at a time where information technology is so advanced that you can find out everything you want and make informed choices,  should not have the terrifying connotation we still give it. And you should not make it the centre of your existence. Deal with it yes, but be ruled by it no! Yet it requires a lot of your time, give it, generously and ungrudgingly. So you may ask, and rightly so, what do I mean by its positive side?

When something hits you where it hurts particularly when nothing warranted it, you are shaken, and the reason you are shaken is because you always felt in charge of your life. You can rant and rave and feel anger and cry. That is what some or many do.

It has been almost two months since I came to know that Ranjan had Hodgkin's disease. I have often wondered why I did nor cry, scream, curse whoever and above all feel let down. I thought it was my coping mechanism to freeze my feelings to deal with the crisis, as I thought it was a crisis. But for the past few days I have realised that I have not frozen any feelings, on the contrary I feel strangely serene, as if many puzzles yet unsolved have fallen into place. Somehow cancer has solved my crossroad dilemma and shown me my priorities and the way I had lost. There will be no angry tears as this too is part of the big picture and the wise accept that.

For the past two months I have been travelling down memory lane more than ever and what is extraordinary is that all the things that seemed ugly, hurtful, mean seem to hold tiny spaces that makes them almost invisible and unworthy of any attention. What I need to do is count my blessings and spend my time being grateful!