Another Christmas Season

Another Christmas season is speedily passing by. And with it, the weight of reminder of twelve years ago and relapse.

This quarter, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relapse. I don’t know what my first cancer would have done to my body. Sure, it ravaged it: I was bald, tired, and facing cardiac challenges. But it was my second cancer that was the final nail in the coffin: cementing ovarian failure, type 1 diabetes, chronic pain and the surgery that paralyzed my phrenic nerve, leaving me with permanent lung damage.

Maybe life would have been just as complicated after my first cancer, but I’ll never know. It’s the second one that I do know about, and that I deal with daily.

I realized this week, that the aftereffects of cancer spread affect even my thoughts about my family. My brother, visiting on his winter break after a rough semester of college, slept for 16 hours straight, twice. The terror in my heart trying to wake him, as I recall the semester I slept every weekend away, a preliminary warning to the returning cancer.

I remember the phone call during the week before finals, indicating something suspicious on a scan. I remember the immediate, gut-wrenching knowledge that as lighthearted as the doctor was trying to be on the phone, that the cancer was back and this was serious. I remember not joining all my friends at the time to watch a ballroom class final and instead going for a spleen biopsy. And I remember spending Christmas eve morning in the hospital, hugging my nurse, crying with her over my relapse.

Christmas has never been the same since. It was the Christmas prior that I had known I was incredibly sick with my first cancer, and Christmas 2012 that solidified that Christmas would never look the same. I know that my diagnosis also tainted my siblings’ lives. The baby was only 6 that year- I can’t imagine what he thought then. I know my siblings love me and will do anything for me, but I still will always bear the guilt of ruining their holiday memories. I’ve seen my siblings shift not to try to prioritize Christmas either. Sure, we go through the motions of gifts and a tree, but no one’s heart is really into the actual day. No one tries to be together for Christmas, and there are only a handful of Christmases since that we have all been together.

I’m glad some of my siblings are here now. I have missed the presence of family. And last night, I was in the kitchen, listening as a few conversations came from around the house, complete with the TV in the corner. It makes me happy to have my house full and people merrily chattering away. I wish so hard I could block out the memories. The memories of the hospital, decorated for Christmas. The memories of Skyping hospital Santa, who magically knew my 3.7 GPA that I was so proud off, that first post-cancer semester of college. The memories that get triggered by certain coffee smells, or hand sanitizer, now more than a decade later. Even now, writing this, I’m breaking all my rules not to cry in the house, as for the first time here the tears are coming.

I’m grateful for my life: for being able to work a job, have the opportunity to love what I do and who I work with and for, and move to Europe. I’m grateful for my community, in Cleveland, Boston, and Luxembourg. I am grateful, but life is heavy. I know Christmas can hold so much meaning, and is to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus, and Advent, and so many wonderful things. But every year, it seems a heavier reminder of the diagnoses that cost me my life.