When someone you love dearly has cancer, it's like you have been diagnosed with it, too. At some point, my girlfriend Christine's ovarian cancer became our cancer. The physical pain she felt after treatments, as she curled herself into a ball on the couch clutching a blanket, became my pain, as well. Our pain.
We're young — what the hell should we know about cancer? We're immortal, right? Cancer is something our parents and their friends are suppose to deal with.
I met Christine three weeks after my wife left me. After a week of solitude, my friends thought it would be a good idea to set up a profile on a popular social networking site, and so I did. That's how Christine and I met. That's how her cancer became our cancer.
Corresponding over the Internet, we were both upfront; I told her I was going through a divorce and she told me she had ovarian cancer. Soon enough, we agreed to meet. We were not looking for anything serious. Life, or so it seemed, simply would not allow it.
I won't lie to you. I know it sounds selfish, but I had to seriously ask myself if I could get involved with a girl who had cancer. I wasn't looking for more heartache at the time. But I dove in, because that's what you do when you truly love someone.
Sometimes the most amazing people in life are people you already know. Christine is definitely one of them. She works 40-hour weeks (where health insurance is not offered), cleans the house (without anyone asking her), and never complains about life or her cancer. She doesn't say things like, "This isn't fair; I'm only 23." Instead, she remains positive and focused on conquering cancer. Our cancer.
"Why don't you ever let it get you down?" I asked her once.
"I did at first," she replied, "but I soon learned that if I sat around and thought about it all the time, I wouldn't want to get out of bed in the morning."
I had a lot of questions about it at first. Christine did her best to answer them. But at the end of the day, no amount of self-denial, or humor, could shield me from reality — my girlfriend has cancer. And people die from cancer all the time, even those too young to die.
Christine only cried once after her diagnosis. She eventually broke down in the public restroom in the restaurant where she works full time (and where medical insurance is not provided). Thankfully, Christine caught it early because she annually visits her gynecologist, which is behavior I now condone for women of all ages. That was three years ago.
Then there was last Monday — the day Christine and I went in for her latest checkup. Ironically, it was my birthday. As I sat in the waiting room alone, I reflected on everything we had been through over one year. I thought about a future that Christine might not be a part of. I mulled over the prospect of perhaps never being able to have children with Christine. It was there in that waiting room that I made the only birthday wish that I ever really cared about.
And it was the only birthday wish I made that ever came true. Our cancer was cured.
I don't know what the future has in store for us. I can't say with any certainty if our cancer will come back. It might. It might not. Life is funny, and I don't pretend to understand it. But I simply refuse to let it dominate my thoughts any longer. Life is too short, and the best parts of it are gone too fast to worry about where the road will take you or whether or not you have enough gas money to make the trip.
In the end, I'm reminded of something Christine wrote for me when we first met: "My passion and my love for life in general is the only thing I have that lets me live a somewhat 'normal' life," she penned. "Our one purpose in life is to create love and, in the process, to be loved."
Please remember that ovarian cancer is one of the deadliest cancers in women, in part because it's often detected at an advanced stage. Over the next year, 15,000 women will die as a result. The fight against cancer begins with awareness and routine medical examinations.
To contact Will E Sanders, visit his website at www.willesanders.com or send him an e-mail at wille@willesanders.com. To find out more about Will E Sanders and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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