I’ve been cranky lately. Fourteen months of grief combined with ten months of focusing on cancer in general, and NET/CS in particular, will do that to you.
I’m tired of feeling like a wet blanket at best–and a damned disruptive nuisance at worst–at virtually every social event I attend. I won’t stop going to them because getting out is good for me–but I’d like to feel like something more than the odd wheel and an object of pity.
And it is not that other people are trying to make me feel that way–or have objectively or subjectively given me any reason to think they do. In fact, people have been pretty universally wonderful. When I need to blow off steam, they let me. When I need hugs, I get them. From conversations in my grief support groups I know this is generally not the case: within a few months folks tell me their friends start trying to line them up with dates and begin insisting that they should be over this by now. No one has done anything like that to me. My friends have largely figured out that this is going to take as long as it takes–and that they are not going to push me to move through this faster than I can.
I’m just tired of feeling down so much of the time. And it makes me cranky.
As does what I have learned about cancer these last months. Cancer in any of its forms is a nasty business. It is a mutation that mutates as fast as we can find things to hit it with. Most forms are difficult to detect and are too often detected too late to bring the best strategies and tactics to bear. And cancer can tear apart families and emotions every bit as effectively as an alcohol or drug addiction can.
And as if all of that were not bad enough, politics gets involved. The Komen case two weeks ago is only the most recent manifestation of that–though it is more blatant than some others. I received praise in an email I got from Dr. Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, because I said I was not interested in taking money from research into other cancers for NET/CS research but rather in finding new money for that work. He told me that most people lobby for their cancer at the expense of others–not with an eye to making the whole pie bigger.
Yet I understand why people do that. Their loved one has a fatal, awful, wasting disease that strips them of their humanity and dignity one painful layer at a time. It makes us selfish and cranky–and it hurts like hell that there is just about nothing you can do to even slow the thing down. It reduces lay caregivers to teenagers with no other way to release their anger than acting out.
And when you lose that loved one after that long battle that deserves more than a funeral at the end, it is damned hard to be selfless and rational when it is over.
