EVERYBODY TALKS

My life with cancer was beginning.  It seemed to me that things were happening rather quickly but the sooner I could get started then the sooner I would be rid of this cancer.  I was putting on a good front but I was a bit scared.  However, the more people I told then the more optimistic and hopeful I felt.  This was a bump in the road for us and not the end of the road.

Hockey Parents - Fall 2006

I suppose that everyone who is diagnosed with cancer has to figure out how to deal with it in their own way.  For me, I decided that I wanted to tell as many people as possible about the cancer and the upcoming chemo.  I didn’t want to show up in places around town like the arena for my kids hockey, the grocery store, or the school and be bald or not looking like myself and have people talking about me behind my back and wondering what was wrong with me.  I also didn’t want to hide away until it was over.  I wanted to live my life as normally as possible.  I would go to my kids’ hockey practices and games, I would attend social functions and parties, I would go to school meetings with teachers, I would go shopping and all those other things that I love to do.  This cancer was not going to shut me down and stop me from living my life.  I was going to carry on and fight this with everything I had in me.  I needed to do this for me.  For my husband and for my children.  They especially needed to see me doing all the things I usually did as often as possible.

I think I’m a pretty positive person most of the time so I really needed to draw on this now more than ever.  I believe there is power in being positive and it certainly doesn’t help to sit around feeling sorry for myself.  What good would that do?  It wouldn’t make me feel better and it would most definitely not make my family feel very good.  So I would be using that positive energy each and every day.  I might have down days and that is to be expected.  However, I would try to minimize those as best as I could.

Dr.Evil & Mini-Me

The main reason I was going to have to tell people soon was that if I was going to lose my hair it would be obvious that something was up.  Mike is already bald so we were going to be a bit of an odd-looking pair.  I’m only 4’11” and he is 6’2” so with the bald heads we had the potential to look like “Me” and “Mini-Me” (for those fans of Austin Powers you will know what I’m talking about).

As I did when I told my girlfriends about the cancer, I turned to my computer and composed another series of emails to send out to friends, family, hockey acquaintances, etc.  Soon we had told mostly everyone.  We made a decision to tell the parents of our kids friends in person.  I didn’t want their children seeing me and finding out about the cancer and getting scared that if it happened to me then it could happen to their Mom too.  I wanted their own parents to explain this in a way that they knew their kids would understand.  Most people aren’t ready for this kind of thing and they don’t teach about cancer in elementary school.

I suppose I just wanted everyone around me and my family to feel comfortable.  Feeling comfortable is good.

Everybody Talks - Neon Trees

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