Recently, in the infusion waiting room ( that's the place you wait until it's your turn to get your chemo or where your loved ones have to wait for you) as I was waiting to be called back to get my chemotherapy cocktail this particular morning, I overheard a young woman sharing with a small group of us a little of her journey. Something that happened to her has really stuck with me and I feel I should be her voice today. She knew she had cancer but did not know it had begun to spread, which is called, metastasis or metastatic cancer. She began having tooth pain and was convinced that due to the treatments she had cavities that she couldn't see. She had a CT scan and it hadn't shown any knew tumors so she returned to the dentist convinced the continued pain in her mouth was cavities and she could no longer live with the discomfort. She wasn't sleeping and couldn't eat so she begged her dentist to remove 2 teeth that she felt were responsible. Unfortunately, this didn't take away the pain and she set another appointment to remove 1 or 2 more teeth; whatever it took to get rid of this unrelenting pain.
Once she told her oncologist what had happened and that she was having more teeth abstracted he sent her for a head MRI to look for another culprit and sure enough the cancer had metastasized to her jaw and was causing the pain in her mouth and not any amount of dental work was going to fix it. I was very sad for my new friend and for what she was going through. Of course her next step was some rounds of radiation along with the chemo but thankfully it took care of these tumors on her jaw.
I can say that I'm glad to be here today and thankful that my path has deviated from some of the places that fellow sojourners have been forced to travel. For me, I've been up some bumpy roads and down a few torrential drenched and gulley lined streets. The truth is that every single illness, though some of the facts may be very similar, the story itself will vary greatly from one another.
I guess today that is the thing that I want to make crystal clear if nothing else makes sense to you.
I have heard so many people trying to make the connections between two people's particularly different journeys. There just isn't much comparison. Even if the exact same type of person, say the age, sex, type of cancer, where it is, diagnosis and even prognosis began at the same time fighting their battle as someone else with everything the same, it would never stay the same and quickly you'd have many differences that would require different decisions on treatment and or surgery and of course the outcomes would always be different.
For you, my message would be; treat everyone and what they're going through as an individual,no matter if it's cancer, their love life hurts or even finance issues. Love them where they are and listen to their heart. Most of all, pray for them, take their crisis serious because even though they may be acting strong they may actually walk away from you and cry the whole way home. (Yes, you guess it; that's me on many occasions)
Thank you for listening to me today, blessings to you! And don't forget to spread a littl love and show an extra dose of compassion to someone who doesn't have it all together..
Love ya,
Jo
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