By Erin Cummings
One of the most insidious aspects of having cancer is that you often have it before you know it’s there. How crazy is to find out, after the fact, that this potential killer is lurking somewhere inside you, and you had absolutely NO idea? I didn’t.
I was just a teenager, but I’d like to think I was fairly in tune with my body. I was beginning to get an idea of what I might look like as a fully grown woman, though I was still more of a rough draft at the time. If anything, I would say I was probably more body-focused than ignorant. OK, I may have been a tad obsessed. I spent way too much time in front of the mirror. Uncooperative hair, acne, a slight overbite- these were the things that I studied for hours. Isn’t that what teenagers do? So how could I not have picked up on the cancer growing inside me? Shouldn’t there have been a clue? How could the body that I thought I knew well betray me so cruelly?
When I was finally diagnosed with Hodgkin’s, months after those Reed-Sternberg cells were multiplying their pants off, I was pissed. I was scared, but I was also pissed as hell.
It reminds me of a scene in the movie, “Mrs. Doubtfire.” It’s the scene where Miranda (Sally Field) discovers that her nanny/housekeeper, Mrs. Doubtfire (Robin Williams) is really her ex-husband in disguise. You can see the shock play out on Miranda’s face- at first, it’s a wide-eyed WHAT?!!! moment, only to be replaced by pure fury. She’s been duped. Big time.
You can see the wheels turning in her mind as she tries to figure out how long this has been going on. “The whole time?” she asks, almost timidly, as if it might not really be true. Then, a second later, her expression turns from hopeful to seething rage. Reality sinks in. “THE WHOLE TIME?” she practically spits out through her teeth. That’s exactly how I felt.
I don’t think that you can ever fully explain what it feels like to find out that you have cancer and that it may have been a part of your life longer than you knew about. It can be difficult to trust yourself again, or anything else for that matter. It’s a wake-up call like no other.
I used my anger about being deceived to become a fighter. As much as I’m not a fan of the whole “warrior/war” language that cancer is often immersed in, I don’t have a better way to describe what a cancer diagnosis brought out in me. Give me some credit, cancer – you may have fooled me, but I’m a lot tougher than you will ever know.