Hello, World

 I’m sorry…I pretty much chose a topic that would be both depressing and full of unnecessary dark humor at times: cancer. I guess you could also be the person to find those two aspects in topics on world tragedies or elderly people falling down…if you’re that kind of person???? How dare you be that kind of person???? Ahhhh, comedy*.

     Anyways, I guess unwillingly coming from a personal relationship with cancer I feel as though I’m allowed to get to that sort of ‘dark humor’ place with it. It’s not meant to be inappropriate or offensive, it’s just one of the ways I learned to deal with my time spent with it. And while having cancer is indeed one of the biggest struggles I’ve faced, I suppose I’ve come out of it and the experience going through various treatments with some funny* stories. Or weird. Doctor-related things mostly get weird. Then again, it could just be the way that I’ll end up wording my experiences and how I talk about how disgusting the processes can be that will end up somewhat humorous. I’ve spent so much time mulling over some of my experiences in my head that I feel as though I should write my thoughts down somewhere. After all, a lot of them haven’t been spoken about once since 2014. It’s not a very comfortable or light hearted topic so it’s not as though it would be easy to bring up a lot of what I may have wanted to express. Why unnecessarily depress your immediate family and friends if you don’t absolutely have to? Am I right?

     All jokes aside, I suppose that this topic is important to me because I really haven’t had the time to express my feelings on a lot of what went on and I also feel like delving back into the experience might help me deal with the fact that it happened just a little bit better. I do not view myself as the cancer survivor who fought the battle and won who is now expected to value life and my meaning here on Earth more. I am angry at the fact that it happened and to be quite honest, pretty blasé about it considering. Putting up walls and forgetting (in a sense) about the situation is a pretty weird coping mechanism—so I guess I’ll be talking about that as well. I really wanted to get to a place where I could stop putting up these mental fronts and feeling like it was almost a dream and let some very real memories back in…even if they are literally nauseating at times. I want to talk about my diagnosis and biopsies along with my feelings towards them and what I had to go through to find out I even needed to get to the point I am at now, doctor’s appointments, laboratory testings, blood-work and IVs, more tests, chemotherapy, social workers visiting me during chemotherapy, limitations, physical responses from my body from the treatment, emotions throughout it, radiation, how to deal with getting bad and good news, other people’s feelings with it and how they’re dealing with someone they know having cancer, how I personally feel about other people’s feelings on the matter, coping mechanisms on my part and how that differs from totally different views on that matter, getting better, getting to a stable place, and finally, how I am now and what lies ahead for me. I can’t guarantee that I can get 15 great weeks out of this topic consecutively or that my research papers will be phenomenal but I really want to try for my own sake and for the sake of those with questions about cancer which, by the way, are five hundred trillion and one. Other people’s questions usually begin with “I hope you don’t mind me asking but” or “You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to but” or “You must get this a lot but” followed by “How did you find out?” because everyone is terrified of finding out they have some sort of cancer one day or “Are you okay now?” or “What’s that scar from?” unless you’re one of those rude drunk people who say something along the lines of “Is that a hickey? Ha ha ha” or “Smoke too much?” which is totally cool and all except that actually pretty offensive because what if I did smoke too much and the hickey commentary is just ignorant because scars don’t look like that and what a weird location to place one anyways. And of course, questions also get to the *deep* “Does this make you view life differently?” or “Aren’t you proud that you’ve beaten it?” though I don’t see being stable as having totally beaten it because I’m always absolutely still terrified of it—something I will talk about most likely towards the end of the weeks working with this blog. Thanks for reading through this if you actually ended up getting to the end of around an 850 word post. I’m somewhat excited to get into this.