Personal Thoughts

Almost like a faucet that had been turned off, phone messages for me stopped as soon as I got my cancer-free news. It made me feel like I was finally normal again. I was no longer the sick person that everyone felt obligated to call on a regular basis. I don't mean that in a bad way. These were family and friends who genuinely cared and wanted to help me. These were the people that got me through the year. I could not have done it without them. They often validated my feelings and sometimes took my feelings a step further, which proved that they understood.

In my mind, I wonder if people will forever think of me as the guy who had cancer. Will I always be "the sick person?" Maybe because I have been HIV positive for 22 years, I've already been "the sick person." Now I'm "the really sick person." And because of my odd sense of humor, I might even be "the sickest person we know."

And yet after just a couple of weeks, I'm sensing that people are starting to put me back into the normal category. As a therapist might ask, "How does that make you feel, Bill?" Hmm. Good question.

It is a very interesting combination of joy and sadness. I did not like the need to accept help from others. That was difficult. However I learned that friends sincerely want to help and by accepting care, I am allowing them to be good people. I did not like being that guy with cancer wherever I went, and yet I did love the drama of it all, if that makes any sense. In some ways, I liked being bald and different. I liked shocking people who didn't know. Once again, it's that sick humor that I loved. The cancer gave me such great material to be funny.

I liked learning all about cancer and chemotherapy. I loved learning that I could go through it with pride, dignity, and some strange sense of wanting more, just to see how much I could take (and then dramatize). As the emergency room nurse told me, "Write a book and title it 'Bring It On, Bitch!'" Does it make sense that the suffering was worth it to be able to write about it?

I also felt the cancer making me more compassionate by the minute.

I tried very hard throughout the year not to talk about the negatives such as pain, procedures or treatments. No one wants to hear about it, and more than that, I didn't like talking about it unless it was over. I would usually twist it into a funny story. I'm not writing this to make me sound like a saint. There were huge ego motivators bouncing around everywhere. I wanted attention but only under my parameters.

There was a special supplement in the LA Times yesterday about how to treat a loved one with cancer. In my opinion, that's like trying to write a directory on how to treat your spouse, or your parents, or your co-workers.  Everyone is completely different. And even more, my mood and my attitude changed so often that my best advice would be to simply listen and treat the person however you feel is appropriate in that moment. You might need to cry, you might need to laugh, or you might need to slap 'em. More than once, I know I needed slapped.

I'm not sure this blog entry has much significance other than a cathartic release of my feelings. We'll just chalk this one up to Baby Bird helping Baby Bird.