Dealing with cancer is hard. Watching someone deal with cancer is even worse. Once one is relieved from cancer and life itself, those around them are left to mourn them and hate cancer for the terrible murderer it is.
Walking down the cold halls of Penn University's Cancer Center feels surreal. Every single person in the waiting room is full of smiles and gratefulness. Conversations spark up between anxious patients, and strangers become friends. There are no boundaries. Everyone becomes an open book, and tells their story to those in similar positions as them.
Every person knows someone who is fighting, or fought cancer. Ultimately, they become the strongest person that you’ve ever met. Every bag of chemotherapy that pours into their bodies is just another bag of hope. Hope that the chemicals that are trashing their body, is also trashing their cancer. Is that ironic? The thing that is killing your body, is saving your life? According to Verywell.com the leading death in people over 65 is cancer, along other things such as heart disease, and COPD.
Having dealt with many cases of my closest family members, and very good friends being diagnosed with cancer, it thickens your skin. It makes you see the bad in the universe, and realize that just because you are a good person does not mean only good will happen to you. I have seen the absolute worst happen to the absolute best. Having seen pancreatic, and lung cancer (in two cases) up close and personal, it destroys a part of you. The light that you have inside of you that hopes for the best burns out. You personally watch the light burn out of someone who you knew as a person whose light would simply just never die. As I write this article I continuously look up and read a eulogy I have placed in the corner of my mirror. It reads “I’d like the memory of me To be a happy one. I’d like To leave an Afterglow of Smiles when day is done...” After the day is done and the tears from the mourning of your loved ones fade, you must remember they want to see you smile. They want their memory to reign on as a joyful time. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas sit around with your family and talk about the ones you have lost...not so everyone can cry, but so everyone can remember the beautiful lives that you had the privilege to have in your life at one point.
If interested in helping find the cure to cancer please click and donate here:
gofundme.com/25pvta5e
All proceeds will go to finding a cure for cancer, so nobody has to see their loved one’s struggle with this horrible disease.
Dedicated to: Mommom Van Auken, Mommom Wilhite, Poppop Wilhite, Uncle Gene and Dawn Kasprzak.
I love you all forever, and thank you for the huge impact you have made on my life. We will beat this one day.
