Top Three Things to Never Say to a Woman Who is Pregnant and Has Cancer

I get the feeling that people fall into one of two camps where this topic is concerned. Either they think these comments are either completely innocent or they consider it unthinkable to even consider saying or asking someone in my situation these things. So I’m going to approach this from a humorous/sarcastic standpoint, trying to avoid seriously offending anyone who may or may not have made these comments to me. But it still needs to be said, so here we go!

1) The offending question: did you know you had cancer when you got pregnant?

a.      The snarky answer: Are you freaking serious!? Yes, OF COURSE I wanted to bring an innocent child into the line of fire here! It’s not enough that MY life is at stake here, why not endanger an innocent baby in the meantime, making this WHOLE process harder on me (and the aforementioned innocent infant) than it has to be!!

b.      Real talk time: Seriously, this brings into serious question my sanity, and also raises questions as to whether someone should call child welfare on me instantaneously. It’s incredibly offensive to imply that I would intentionally do something like that, whether the person asking the question realizes it or not. Just…think first, k? K.

    2) The offending question: will any of this (treatments/tests/procedures/etc) hurt/endanger the baby?

a.      The snarky answer: Oh yeah, definitely. And? If I have to go down, might as well take someone with me!!

b.      Real talk time: everything that we have done and are going to do is only done because the benefits outweighed the risk, usually because the alternative was ME FREAKING DYING!! Believe it or not, same as me not intentionally bringing a child into the world under these conditions, I do not, in fact, exactly relish the idea of putting said child into danger during the one time this poor child is supposed to be the safest she’ll ever be in her life. The fact that she’s instead possibly in the greatest danger she’ll ever be in breaks my heart. But if we were to do nothing, the alternative is me dying, in which case she would die too. And the thought of that breaks my heart even more.

    3) Why aren’t you working/what do you even do all day?

a.      The snarky answer: Work is overrated and boring and getting cancer to get out of it seemed like so much more fun! Seriously, who wouldn’t want to stay at some battling cancer/pregnant/and treatment side effect symptoms day in and day out, all day every day!? As to what I do, obviously just take advantage of this time to be lazy all day because I’m definitely not busy fighting cancer and growing a baby and dealing with all the pain and discomfort that implies. It’s like a party every day of my life right now!

b.      Real talk time: friends, growing a baby is freaking HARD. Fighting cancer is harder. Doing both at once at the same time is nearly impossible. And I wasn’t kidding when I was talking about all the symptoms I have to deal with. In fact, my immune system is pretty much completely shot at this point in time. You see, the cancer is in my immune system, and some of my treatments compromise it even more. That was one of the deciding factors in my doctors ordering me to stay home while battling cancer. I can’t even go out very often because I have to avoid places with lots of people. (Also I’m on oxygen and going out is a huge hassle anyway, lol.)

Obviously most the time these questions are not asked from a malicious place. But they do get burdensome to answer after a while, especially the ones that unwittingly call into question my very humanity. And sometimes I don’t take offense at all if it’s coming from someone I’m close to, or if it’s obvious that they don’t mean it in a bad way and are genuinely wondering. But sometimes you can just tell it’s being asked from a place of morbid curiosity, which leaves me feeling like some circus sideshow, or just feeling like a horrible person.

So the moral of the story here is, think long and hard about whether you should be asking these questions, or at the very least think about the way you are presenting these questions.
Sometimes it’s better for everyone to just not know.

Diagnosis: "Fat"

This may be the hardest blog I’ve ever written. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about my weight or body image issues, because being open and honest about your insecurities tends to open you up to more ridicule and criticism, and that’s a dangerous thing to do, especially on the internet. However, I feel like maybe if I’m honest about what happened to me as a result of fat-shaming, it might save someone else from going through the same thing. And if I can help anybody out, it’ll be worth any criticism or ridicule. In my present condition I’m kind of past worrying about my own vanity anyway. There are much more important things to worry about.

I’ve been doing a lot of looking back recently. Most of the time I’m either trying to figure out when the cancer started, or I’m judging myself for not realizing I had cancer earlier, now that I can look back and spot all the symptoms. It’s not a healthy practice at all, but I have a lot of free time on my hands now that my official job title is “Cancer Fighter.” And what I’ve realized during the moments of reminiscing is…I spent so much time fat shaming myself, and letting one doctor do the same, that I put my own life at risk. 

You see, some of the major symptoms of my type of cancer (that I personally went through) are fatigue, unexplained weight loss, difficulty breathing, difficulty swallowing, and night sweats. The defining trend with all of those symptoms is that they can also easily be attributed to being overweight, or at least a lot of them can. And when you’re overweight and start losing weight, even unintentionally, you tend not to question it, and your doctors tend to encourage it.

So that is where I was for several months. What turned out to be fatigue due to cancer was something that I was ashamed of because I thought I was just overweight and lazy. I needed to work out more, right? I obviously just needed to build up my stamina. 

The difficulty breathing was another issue all together. I had a pretty bad upper respiratory infection in September. I actually started seeing a pulmonologist at that time, because of that infection and because I tend to have chronic upper respiratory problems anyway. This particular infection left me with a residual cough that lasted several months afterwards, and that’s what lead me to discovering what I for months referred to as “the lump in my throat.” The pulmonologist ran all kinds of tests on me, including two different lung capacity tests, the second one about two months after the first. The second test showed my lungs working at only 50% capacity, down from about 80% at the first.

The doctor thought this was simply because of my weight. I accepted that explanation.

By the time I received my diagnosis, I had lost over 10% of my body weight. I had been battling crippling fatigue for months. I did have other symptoms that could not be explained away with a diagnosis of being fat (like the fact that I couldn’t even swallow fluids anymore), and that’s what finally lead me to seeking medical attention. 

One of the few good things about my diagnosis is how I now have a logical explanation for everything I’d been struggling with for so long. And the explanation has nothing to do with my size. I can now look back and recognize that even with being overweight, I was actually in pretty good health before the cancer started. If only I had believed that.

So I guess my point in writing all of this is to first of all work through my regret in not listening to my body. While I may never have come up with “cancer” being the reason for everything, I definitely could have recognized that there was something seriously wrong if I hadn’t been so busy being ashamed of myself. Secondly, to let anyone else going through anything similar to this know that they’re not alone. I have heard other stories like mine. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Fat doesn’t always equal unhealthy, and whatever size we find ourselves at, we know our bodies well enough to know when there’s an issue that has nothing to do with weight. Maybe we just need to learn to trust ourselves rather than sit in silence due to shame.

Regarding the Bad Days

Some days are worse than others. I’ve already written a blog about how I’m not strong. I meant every word of it. I’m not strong. I get through everything because I don’t have a choice. I have cancer whether I like it or not and I have to deal with it the best way I possibly can, moment by moment and day by day.

Some days…my best is worse than it is on other days. Wednesday was one of those days for me.

You see the thing is, I have so many diagnoses right now, and so many medications to try to control everything going on with me, that between the symptoms of the diagnoses and the side effects of the medications, not to mention just plain being pregnant, my body feels like it’s part of some kind of sadistic science experiment from hell. And I’m not saying that just to use gratuitous profanity, I honestly feel like hell is the only place that could possibly come up with the stuff I deal with at times.

And it’s hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever dealt with. Some days all my symptoms are worse than others. Wednesday was like that. Some days I am faced with debilitating, crippling fatigue. I’m talking like the kind of fatigue that starts in the center of your being and spreads throughout your entire body, even to the extremities of your fingertips, to where even simple tasks like keeping yourself fed and hydrated become more than you can handle.

Those days are the hardest. And that kind of fatigue is my most common symptom. It’s worse some days than others. Sometimes the steroids I’m on mask the fatigue and I’m more mentally alert even while my body is still tired. Those days are easier to handle because it’s easier to talk myself through it.

Other days…I just let it happen. I let the fatigue happen. I let the pity party happen. Sometimes it just has to so that you can move on. I’ll be honest, I spent a huge part of Wednesday just feeling sorry for myself. A lot of “Why me?” prayers were prayed. I had an emotional meltdown or two.

I’m not proud of it. However, I’m also not ashamed. It’s OK to have a moment of weakness every now and then, regardless of what you’re going through. You don’t have to have a cancer diagnosis during pregnancy (or just a cancer diagnosis in general) in order to earn the right to have a meltdown.

Life is freaking hard sometimes.

The trick is what you do once the meltdown is over, once that day is over, once that week is over, if that’s what it takes!

I took the day off. Then I dusted myself off and got started all over again. I got back into the fight. One bad day, one emotional meltdown, one horrible diagnosis doesn’t have to define how you handle the entire situation. The only way that happens is if you let it and quit fighting, and that can only happen if you forget what you’re fighting for. And there’s always so much to fight for!

My Ramblings about Healing

As a Christian, I’ve done a lot of thinking about my beliefs on healing in the last few months. Divine healing. Miraculous healing would be another word for it. Or supernatural.

There are dozens and dozens of scriptures about God’s healing. I’m not going to get into all of them here because the point of this particular ramble is not to argue the theology of whether or not God’s healing is possible. As a Christian, I know and believe all of these scriptures. There is not a single doubt in my mind that God can and will instantaneously heal me if he so chooses. I pray for that daily.

But I also believe there’s more to the story. As a Christian, I have also witnessed instances where God doesn’t heal. I don’t pretend to know why this happens, but I refuse to believe that this happens because of a lack of faith, or because they didn’t pray right, or because they didn’t have enough people praying for them. I refuse to even consider that there’s some kind of equation involved that you have to discover and stick with when it comes to God’s healing. I don’t think there is a magic combination of words you have to mutter in prayer in just that right order at just the right time with just the right amount of faith.

Let’s be real. I wouldn’t serve a God like that.

What I really want to address right now, however, is the middle ground. That place between God not healing, and God instantaneously healing. That part where you are sick long term (in my case pregnant and cancerous). And right now I'm staring  down the barrel of a long journey of potentially painful treatments that will poison my body in order to heal my body, endless doubts and fears, and the simple terrifying ordeal that we call the “unknown.”

Because in my case, in my personal journey so far with cancer, I believe 100% that I’m going to be healed. I’ve never doubted for even a second that God is going to bring me through this. There’s no way this is the end of the road for me. I just don't know exactly how that's going to happen.

I pray every day for healing, instantaneous if that’s what God wants to do, but I also pray for endurance if I have to “take the long way around.” This healing process isn’t about instant gratification. It’s about faith. Sure, I ask questions of God when I’m still cancerous at every appointment. Questioning everything is a side effect of cancer. I wonder sometimes why God’s taking me the long way. I think God is OK with those questions though. And even if I don’t receive an answer (or instant gratification), I still have faith that there is a reason for what I’m going through.

Instant healing is obviously a major faith booster for anyone who has ever experienced or witnessed it. But how much more faith does it take to have faith when you have to make the decision to believe for your healing every day when you wake up and are still ill? I have to make that decision every day, every time I have to take one of my dozens of pills, or injections, or have to take my blood sugar to monitor my brand new gestational diabetes diagnosis (thank you, steroids), or see the changes happening in my body due to the cancer or the treatments or the numerous side effects of anything and everything I just listed. I have to decide to have faith every time I hook myself up to the oxygen because my heart rate shoots through the roof and I get light headed without it.

I don’t pretend to understand why I’m going through this. I don’t pretend to know the theology behind suffering. I could write an entire blog about that alone and still not have any good answers for either me or anyone else out there suffering, or even those watching a loved one suffer.

What I do know that my past sufferings have always left me a better person on the other side, and I intend for this to be another part of that pattern.