Pride and Cancer

I fear pride, my own pride, may be a late casualty in my doctors' war against my body. Let me be clear, I don't mean the effects, the side effects, the medication, the scars, or many other things that cancer and its treatment ravage against your body. Those things I knew were in my future the moment the neurosurgeon said it was a glioblastoma; that terrible son-of-a-bitch in my brain. Those things make me grow, make me stronger, they've made me more appreciative of the world and the people in it.

My pride, as I speak of it here, are the things people do to make their world better. Most everyone does it, mostly without knowing. You go to work, you manage your family, you pay bills and taxes and donate to and do the things you find good. You do the things that make the world go round, socially and economically, and these make the world better. This normal existence in all of it wonderful variances is what I wanted desperately. It's why I went to High School, CC, Loyola. Given, none of these things paid anything and mostly sucked a zillion dollars from somebody's pocket but I eventually intended to make something of them--to contribute to society and pave my own road both figuratively and literally speaking. I did them to be free to go anywhere in the world and do what I felt was my calling be that in East Timor or Chicago or West Virginia. I hoped to fall in love--raise a family. That's what I mean by pride. Doing something.

My own pride, I feel is slipping away. I'm not doing anything. The pictures I take are nice, but they aren't that good. The things I do, I do to occupy time. The doctor wants me to take Avastin for the "foreseeable future" (meaning till it stops working). That's once every two weeks and all the time I feel like crap. I haven't been able to think of a way to remedy this situation.

My mom suggested that I volunteer at the cancer center at Loyola. That's an idea and I honestly think I could do some real good there. The issues with volunteering at Loyola are twofold, rather threefold. First, I don't like seeing people doing what I can't do, that is being a medical student, a doctor. Anger, frustration, jealousy, etc. Second, I don't know if I can handle being around people with whatever cancer. I used to go to this website for young people with glioblastomas. That was great until I was the senior member of the forums. I stopped going to that.

That's the bitch of it. People die with my disease. I'm fortunate that I haven't, but I feel that volunteering in the cancer ward would be like the web forums. I make friends, I form relationships, they die. Yeah... it's a bitch.

I think I'm going to do it anyway. Volunteering that is the sort of thing that I can and have found pride in. It doesn't pay my bills, but it definitely lets me do good by people. Plus, what did I think would happen when I became a doctor? All my patients would be happy and no one ever dies? That happy go lucky medicine wasn't what I was interested in anyway. You go to the poorest, the sickest, the person who's on his death bed and you become his friend. I can't not do it because of my own situation, I have to do it because of it. Someday I'll be that person and I'd like a friend.

I suppose pride may have to mean something different. Scratch mobility, scratch socially, scratch economically. I'll have to take people's help when I need it and likewise pass it along however I can. Then, perhaps, the world will still go round.

Oh yeah... the third fold. Would I have to wear to goofy vests they make the highschoolers wear? That would be a deal breaker for me.

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