Thank you for being strong.

A friend/co-worker of mine, Ms. MB, was diagnosed with breast cancer this October. I was not able to really handle this until now. Now I feel like that I can, sort of, handle it, talk about it, and let out the feelings.

Since my dad died of cancer, the word "cancer" sounds like the summon from the Death. He was diagnosed with cancer when I was nine and passed away in less than a year, a couple of weeks before my 10th birthday. People might think that a ten-year-old kid would not be affected as much as a grown-up because I didn't like to reveal too much of my emotion (I don't like to do it now as well). However, I know that something has changed since then. Biomedical or clinical journals for lay-people used to be my favorite reading as a kid. Even after I got to know the diagnosis for my dad, I read, actually with fear, a lot about different therapies (especially some from the traditional medicine) and cases of cancer patients. However, I couldn't read anything like that for quite a while. Even now, sometimes I read about cancer-related articles, I still feel somewhat uncomfortable.

What is worse, after the death of my dad, I found it hard to deal with the situation that someone surrounding me is diagnosed with cancer, but I have never told this to anyone else. This year is particularly bad. A very close friend of our family, someone who witnessed my life since I was a baby, passed away in January. She was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago, suffered from the recurrence of the cancer, and suddenly died of the complication of heart attack. Later, my aunt, one of my mother's younger sisters, got a tumor removed from her brain a couple of months ago. Fortunately, the pathological check showed that the tumor is a benign one. However, because of the position of the tumor, she has been on chemotherapy since the surgery and suffered a lot from it. The third one is the friend I mentioned at the beginning. She has been through two surgeries so far and cleaned up all the tumor tissues. Her tumor hasn't be spread so that she doesn't have to go through any chemo- or radiotherapy. However, she still got a couple of plastic surgeries for reshaping and will be put on close watch from now on to prevent the recurrence.

Since I couldn't handle it, I tried to run away from it. I relied on my mom to send my greetings to our family friend and my aunt because I couldn't do it. Now it is my own friend, so I have to by myself. Although we are not very close friend, she is still one of those around me and we used to see each other on a daily basis in the past. She is very nice and helpful to me, but she is a tough person as well. This actually makes the situation more difficult since I know that tough people won't be whining about what happens to them and won't want others to be over-concerned. Actually, it was already really hard for me to handle the news that she had been diagnosed with cancer. As a result, for almost two months after I knew her diagnosis, all I could do is to send her emails that didn't sound encouraging even to myself though I tried so hard. I know that, as a friend, I should have at least called her, but I couldn't.

I hadn't seen her until two weeks ago. She had already finished her first surgery which was not a big one. However, the results from the pathologists were very discouraging. The surgery didn't clean up all the cancer tissue and she would need a second surgery to have more breast tissue removed. It was a very hard time for her, or any woman. She mentioned in the email that she was crying a lot at that time. I would rather postpone meet her but I was supposed to help her with her field-trip in Seneca, so the meeting was inevitable. I was a little relieved at the first sight because she didn't look like a patient. She also said that she really enjoyed the trip given the weather giving us so much trouble because she needed a little escape before her second surgery. Naturally, we didn't talk much about her cancer, and I tried to behave as if it had never happened.

I went to visit her on Wednesday, the day after her second surgery, with a couple of other friends/co-workers (I was still intimidated by the idea of visiting her all by myself). Although she was still recovering, she was in a high spirit. She showed us the nice gifts (a lot of pink, of course) from others, talking about the following plastic surgery, and making fun of her surgery vest as "the most trendy bra". I was laughing at her jokes. All of sudden, I realized that I was relieved and laughing.

I will still have a hard time dealing with the situation of people surrounding me diagnosed with cancer, but I know I have taken my first step away from the shadow of the past. Thank you, MB, for being strong for yourself and all others who care about you. Thank you.