It took an entire season to get to the support group. Sure I'd gotten the reminders - the “save the dates” and the occasional email from another young breast cancer survivor who has asked me how I’m settling in, and oh-by-the-way there’s a meeting coming up for the young cancer survivors, and are you going? Thanks, great, and now let’s shift the conversation to the Kardashians.
But there’s always been some sort of excuse - I’ve been stuck inside the term-paper writing cave, I can’t get myself to the train station for the schlep, or maybe the fear of putting myself in the spotlight and doing an emotional striptease. I’d seen all of the movies before starting with the AA meetings. “Hi, my name is Amy, I’m 38 (a newly minted 38), I’m a breast cancer survivor and I’m really scared of being here because…”
Fear can be debilitating so I’d put the meetings on the back burner, perhaps unconsciously. But on this frigid Sunday afternoon, less than two weeks before Christmas, I’d surfaced from the writing cave, semi recovered from the holiday party food comas, and I’d done much of the Christmas (aka online shopping). The office was clearing out, I found myself twiddling a finger and looking at the clock. If I got up now I could make it to the meeting. I could do it, so I picked myself up, somewhat reluctantly at first, but nonetheless picked myself up.
So I made the trek via public transportation to the metro station into the heart of the city, walked past the holiday shoppers, the Salvation Army Santas, and arrived at the centre, the front of it an art gallery and the inside where the meeting would be held was a spacious room, warmly lit, with a mini buffet of quesadillas and guacamole and chips set out, and a circle of chairs that swiftly filled with young people, mostly in their late 20s to early 30s who currently or had suffered some form of cancer. Most of them were women, but there were a handful of men. In some cases you could clearly see who remained in Cancerland. A pretty young woman with the bluest eyes with a kerchief, a large black woman who looked healthy if it had not been for her severely thinning hair, and I spotted a third young woman who was clearly wearing a wig. But most of them as what one might define as normal. It could have been a film discussion group, but this was cancer.
Counterclockwise, everyone shared their cancer story, and this is where normalcy was shattered. Some told the stories matter-of-factly, others with bitterness, others with humour. The stories were sobering – the girl who had a reoccurrence at the same time her father was diagnosed with cancer, a woman who was treated for cancer of the eye only to swiftly find out it had moved to cancer of the breast with signs of it on her liver. There was a pretty woman with long blonde hair who later shared that the hair was a wig. It was once again sobering. There was the young man with the infectious smile who had had his entire colon removed.
I was scared when it came to me and gave my drive-through minute version of the story, mostly sticking with the facts. Surgery, radiation, the bi-continental move, early on I’d realised that I was maybe the luckiest one there with the lightest case, but being out in the spotlight was frightening. In retrospect I had told my story in one breath, I was that nervous.