Saturday, December 1, 2012

Once a survivor, always a survivor

When I was 26 I had cancer. I'm fine now, so please don't worry; next year I plan to celebrate 20 years cancer-free (don't worry, you'll all be invited to the party).

When I was first diagnosed I went through all the stuff you hear about cancer patients going through - I contemplated my mortality, I cried, I fought and so on. And I was lucky, I survived with remarkably few aftereffects. But I didn't think of myself as a survivor for a long time. I remember, about a year after it was all over, talking about it with a friend and she said, "You will always be someone who had cancer." Almost 20 years later I am still understanding what that means.

So when I saw the xkcd strip below, I surprised myself by bursting into tears.

I am reminded that we are always survivors. I will always be a cancer survivor. You will always be a survivor of whatever it is that has honed and shaped you. And that survival is worth celebrating.

My biopsy-versary is April 19th. I mark it every year, my reminder that I am still here.

Find your survivor-versary and mark it. You are worth celebrating.

courtesy xkcd.com under this creative commons license. Thanks.

(c)2012 Laura S. Packer Creative Commons License

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad you're a survivor!

    When mom was sick she was given a lucky bamboo (on my window sill above the sink) on national cancer survivor day. When I questioned this I was told that the American cancer society defines survivor as someone from moment of diagnosis to moment of death...

    ReplyDelete

True Stories, Honest Lies by Laura S. Packer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.truestorieshonestlies.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.laurapacker.com.
Related Posts with Thumbnails