^{originally published December 2nd, 2004}

It has been eight years since I finished my final round of chemotherapy. I was cured. Some days it seems like it was just yesterday, but most days it seems like a lifetime ago. It’s amazing how quickly life can change.

In September of ‘96, my life was heading in a different direction; it has been so long that I don’t quite remember what direction it was going in, but I sure as hell know this isn’t the path that I saw for myself. People would tell me that things happen for a reason. Two surgeries later, two rounds of chemotherapy, pneumonia, a degenerative disk from the chemo, nerve damage, the loss of being able to have children-I still wonder: what was the point of all that? Why did this need to happen? I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that I feel like an ass every time I ask myself that. I am thankful that it was me and not one of my friends or cousins.I don’t want that ever to happen to someone that I care about.

I know I should feel lucky, but most of the time I just feel guilty. I got a curable kind of cancer. Yes it sucked, still does suck, and I guess it always will always suck, but it isn’t going to kill me. We think of all the shitty things that we have to go through in our daily lives while most people my age will never know what it is like to tell their mother that they have cancer. Sometimes you will think about how shitty it must be to get out of bed and go to work. This sucks, because we should be glad that we have the ability to get out of bed. Yeah, things suck sometimes, and for some of us most of the time, but we can still get up. Tomorrow, we will be okay. My uncle once said, “You know, if you have a warm bed to sleep in, three square meals, and nobody is shooting at you, then things aren’t that bad.”

Some days we feel like throwing in the towel, saying “that’s it, I give up,” but deep down inside we know that we would never do that. I remember my cousin telling me that people would ask him if it was hard to grow up without his mother, who died when he was fifteen. He told me that he would tell them that he didn’t have a choice-he did what he had to do. He said that it was much like what I was going through. I didn’t have a choice; I did what I had to do. Shit happens, and sometimes we are stuck with it, but giving up is never an option.

One thing always stood out in my mind when I was getting chemo. I would be there for eight to ten hours, and I would see people come and go. Most of them were sixty or seventy years old, and I thought, I want that to be me when I get that age. Not that I wanted cancer; I just want to be that age and still be fighting hard for my life, even if only to extend it by a month or two. I think of this one girl, the only one my age there. She had melanoma on her lung. She asked me if I was going to be okay. I told her yes and asked her if she would be okay. She told me they didn’t know, that they needed to see if this round of chemo would shrink the tumor. She is dead now, and so are most of the people that were in the office the days that I was there. I was one of the few that survived this long and I will continue to survive as the years go on. I am not sure what that means, but I do know that it means something.

Your Friend, Vincent