Faced with cancer and cancer risk.

Trust me, cancer can be an experience out of this world. Perhaps you can remember the count of how many times you have wished to die rather than live for another day. This might be even worse during the chemotherapy treatment and the surgeries which are combined into a long process pain, suffering, dejection and destitution.

Actually, the chemotherapy treatment might have been extended for the last six years and you might presently be on your 55th course. Presently you might be on an experimental infusion planned to last for 15 days each month. The experience might be breathtaking and almost unbearable to say the least. But the funny thing is you might be glad you have lived through it all. You be a better person than you would have ever been if you never got cancer.

For instance you might have for example learnt that life is an opportunity to learn and patiently wait to become your destined self. Today, you live imperceptibly ebbing on physical stamina, preferring to walk slowly rather than run, or to take the elevator not the stairs, to sit down peacefully rather than stand or move around. It has taken a lot to accept this state as yours considering you used to be a very active person, as active as they come.

You might have witnessed a radical change of personality in reacting either to people and situations. The initial experience of cancer diagnosis is difficult to handle and frightening to live with because it means losing some control of one's lifestyle and accepting a transformation from an active do all to a deliberately slow to act person especially after you are barely able to sit up or function effectively. This creates an overwhelming and severely disheartening feeling that requires a real winner to overcome. You have overcomed, Somewhere in the very deepest part of your heart, the truest self who always hides out under cover in most people, tells you that this temporary drug-induced episodes, of cancer treatment are not bigger than your will to live. Your grand children might graduate from college six years from now and you intend to enjoy every single day of those six years.

A cancer patient must build an unwavering solemn faith in God, because it is Him who perpetually enables you to live, to persevere, to conquer and to hope that soon you will see your way through the therapies into the clearing of good health. And so you continue, saving for your old age with every intention of using it to the last dollar. Yet with hope, you try to live each day at a time focusing your thoughts wholesomely in the present tense so as you can comprehensively deal with all the matters close at hand and heart. This is a struggle by itself because you have to continually make yourself seem stupid when talking to your children. You always try to ignore the implications of advancing cancer and instead concentrate on the concrete and the practical things you can possibly change.

You have learnt to compartmentalize this illness without giving it a free rein over life. This means living in constant state of reality denial and always keeping your mind off the cancer. You can always surround yourself with good people and the situations which bear absolutely no relationship to the cancer.