Taking it all in

It has been since months since I was diagnosed with cancer. I have since been tested and prodded and surgically treated. I have had one follow up visit (still awaiting results)... but it is only now that I feel like I can talk, or even think about what happened. I don't have cancer anymore, I'm not sure I even did in the first place. It happened so fast and was so unexpected that it never registered that I had a life threatening illness.

I feel strange with my brush with cancer, it doesn't seem like it happened at all. It raises all sorts of questions of the 'why' variety. If there is a God, why scare the bejubus out of me, then make it seem like it never happened? I remember a lot of fear and denial and guilt. Isn't that interesting. Guilt over not have as bad of cancer as everybody else. "Please don't call me a survivor... I just had a wart removed, that's all." That's how it felt to me.

It started me thinking about hospice patients that are given a diagnosis of 6 months or less when they didn't know they were sick in the first place. When I worked with them, they seemed calm or sometimes in daze, not exactly sure of what to make of the situation. Shock I guess you would call it. Now I have experienced it first hand... if my diagnosis had been worse, and it took me 6 months to realize what was happening to me in the first place... where would I be?