Feeling Lucky

I've been feeling pretty darn optimistic for the past few days. Pondering everything that has happened, I'm starting to believe it, internalize it. How incredibly lucky I am to have plodded through without the chemo, without the radiation, without having to make the difficult risk vs. benefits choices that so many patients have to submit to in addition to their surgeries. All of a sudden, I'm starting to feel a bit of the humble thankfulness that I've been pretty much faking, but still striving for.

Yes, I'm still "tight as a drum," still go through every day with pain and constriction as a constant companion, still shrink with something akin to revulsion and horror when I catch sight of myself in a mirror, and still leak tears when I'm feeling all sorry for my sorry self. But really, I think I'm starting to get a grip. I got off easy. I really have little cause to rant or sing the blues, even if my reality seems to trump other peoples' trials, by the singular fact that it happen to me.

Concentrating on one's blessings rather than one's misfortunes is a constant struggle for me. It doesn't really make me feel better to know that other people have bigger obstacles to overcome, harder lives, or more devastating losses. In fact, the opposite has been true: I've felt guilty because other people have handled their challenges with so much more cheerfulness and aplomb.
(And here I sit, with the boo-boo face on, when I suffered so minutely in comparison).

But I've decided that comparing your own experience to someone else's, while living your own trials day-by-day, is a losing game. There's always someone worse off than me. Does that diminish whatever negatives I am feeling, simply by knowing that somewhere, another person is suffering worse? Of course not. We can imagine what it would be like to live someone else's trauma, but we cannot identify with it on the same personal level that we monitor our own experience.

Strangely, there seems to be a hierarchy in the world of cancer, just like there is in every other facet of life. I am guilty of it too. When I was first diagnosed, I noticed a temptation in myself to dismiss people who had lesser forms; in other words, I had little to no sympathy for women who had a Stage 0 lumpectomy, when I had to have a bilateral mastectomy! Then when I cruised the blogs (looking for hope, I think), I found stories that wrenched my soul, and made me cry with relief that all I had was my paltry little surgery. I'd tell myself, "at least I didn't have to spend six months throwing up," or "thank heavens I have insurance," or "how can she go on, when it's metastasized to her lungs and brain?" So, briefly, I was grateful. And then my own reality would grab back on and send me into fear of the future, rather than comfort me in the now.

I don't like the idea of taking comfort in my own situation by comparing it to someone who is worse off, or feeling somehow more smug, more put upon, more challenged than someone who got off even easier than I did. Everyone--yes, even the Stage 0--has had to deal with same emotional roller-coaster and some form of gross physical assault that this disease brings.

It is what it is, for everyone touched by it. Everyone's reality is different, yet we all share a commonality of experience. The disease intruded on our lives, and I don't think it matters how much, only that it rocked our individual worlds and changed everything forever. So I've given up on comparisons. They just don't work.

I really do feel lucky to be alive, and to have such a good prognosis. I think about that everyday. How could I feel anything but sincerely thankful?