"As you will be, too."

10 Things I Learned from Cancer (Part Two) 

...Continued...

2. We can beat cancer.

Last week someone asked me, How do you deal with fear? I answered truthfully -- I write.  And that  night, I wrote ... a rather lengthy blog dissecting some of my fears. Still, I feel like I haven't told the full story. So tonight I'm going to add to that story a bit.

It's true that writing has been an invaluable therapy for me through my cancer battle. Obviously, however, there are times when I can't write; when fear comes over me and I need to face it and fight it off without a blank blog post or a piece of paper; when I can't call Brian or my Mom and cry to them. When I just need to figure it out.

Tonight, I tried to think of what makes me feel better in those moments and I realize that the answer has been the same since soon after I was diagnosed -- it's this simple thought: Others have beat cancer, so I can, too. 

I knew so little about cancer before my diagnosis. In fact, before last August, I pretty much figured that anyone who got cancer died from it (yes, that's part of why those first few weeks were so hard for me). But then, gradually, I started to realize that my assumption was completely wrong. People beat cancer every day and those people, and their stories, give me strength and hope and faith when I need it most.

Throughout my whole life, my family and my friends have been my rocks and my guiding lights and when I got cancer, they did what they always had done -- they took care of me. In fact, they were the best caregivers I could ever ask for.

I hate to follow up that paragraph with a sentence that starts with, "But," because there's really no "but" about how great my loved ones have been to me. But ... none of them had ever had cancer (a good thing, for sure!). No matter how much they wanted to do to help me, none of them were able to be that face of someone who had done what I now needed to do.

Obviously Kristin was a huge help to me, but she was a cancer patient like I was so it felt more like we were in the same trench, and that's only so comforting. Soon after my diagnosis, however, new angels swooped down from the sky. One of those angels is a woman named Anne.

I barely knew Anne before August of last year. She is one of the law librarians in Verrill Dana's home office in Maine and we had met at most, twice. 

I remember reading her first email to me back in August while I was on vacation with my family. I must have read that email a hundred times, except for one part, which I must have read two hundred times. In that most precious part, Anne wrote:

I am a 20 year survivor; as you will be, too. Yes, you will. Hold on to that belief, it will see you through a lot.

No amount of money in the world could buy the peace and hope that those words gave me back then, and still give me now, several months later. Anne was one of the first people to make me see that people do beat cancer and that I could, too. She continues to send me emails that I file in a special subfolder of my inbox that I call "Hope Messages." I think that title tells how much those emails mean to me.

I could write pages and pages tonight about so many other brave men, women, and children who have fought this disease and won; about other angels that have come into my life. But I thought we could all do something far more powerful. Because I'm just one voice and there are countless others that should be heard.

So tonight, I'm putting this request out there to each and every one of you:

Please consider posting a short comment below -- Anonymously or by name, it doesn't matter. Not to be bossy (OK, maybe I can't help it), but I was thinking the comments could be in this form, inspired by Anne's hope message:

I'm cancer survivor; as you will be, too. 

Or, My mother / father / son / daughter / wife / husband / best friend / hairdresser / mechanic / boss / dog walker / mailman / whomever is a cancer survivor, as you will be too.

If you want to tell more, of course, feel free, but it's not necessary.

Please forward this blog to anyone that you think could add to this powerful collection (or, more importantly, anyone that you think could benefit from seeing it). Let's make the comments go on for pages and pages. In my darkest times, and in others', those comments could be precious light.

As much as I will cherish the comments we assemble, I don't mean them to be just for myself. The "you" in "as you will be too" is not just me. It's every patient that needs to be reminded of one of the most important things I learned about cancer -- that people have beat it. As we will, too.

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Note:  Thanks to how much I've talked about boobs, or just a deficient Google Blogger spam filter, nasty spam comments have been poisoning these pretty pink pages. As a result, I changed my blog settings so that I need to approve of a comment before it is published. Please don't let that stop you from contributing. Go ahead and post your comments to spread this priceless hope. Meanwhile, I'll fight the spammers who just can't wait to sell you something to enlarge certain parts of your body.