This passed Thursday was Thanksgiving and I am rather surprised there are no Thanksgiving themed blogs up yet. Maybe holiday themed blogs are too cliché, but hey so is Black Friday shopping but I am a big advocate for that too. So here goes my Reasons to be Thankful blog. I am surrounded by reasons to be thankful this year. Last year I was thankful I did not have cancer. I vividly remember last year bowing my head over my plate full of turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, and the works and thanking God I did not have cancer. It was a very trepidations time for me and my family. My doctor grew more and more worried about my white blood cell count. I grew more and more worried about my mortality. Becoming a permanent fixture on the twelfth floor of Sloan became a scary possibility. No one knew what to expect for me. My body was an anomaly. Some tests my doctor ran were showing tell tale signs of leukemia. However, the rash that was initially classified as MDS was a scary memory. MDS is a precursor sign of some forms of leukemia that only goes away with treatment of chemotherapy. My MDS went away by itself and has yet to reoccur (and hopefully never will). Three-hundred and sixty-five days have come and gone, along with my hair, and I am now thankful for something very different. I am thankful I overcame cancer. Going through all that I have gone through is a very humbling experience. If I never had cancer, the love of my friends and family would not be as tangible to me as it is now. I am thankful I appreciate life a little differently than I did before. I am thankful I have a support system that is as powerful as it is. I am not thankful for my cancer—that would just be the most ridiculous statement ever made. Yet, I am most thankful for what cancer brought into my life. In a really strange way I am also thankful for what having leukemia has taken away from me as well. I am thankful I no longer smoke a half a pack of cigarettes a day. I am thankful for the people that could not handle seeing me sick no longer being in my life. I am most thankful for the people who are so strong that they have taken me and all of my “problems” on and love me without seeing a continuous struggle.
On Black Friday I was not out shopping with the masses. Instead of making a trip to the nearest mall, I had to travel to Sloan to get the shots I wrote about in my last blog. For some reason I was extremely emotional while there. “I just want all of this to be over” was the only sentence that ran through my head. It was bad enough that the wait time for the two relatively simple shots was four hours. The stress from the hospital took over and collided with my already intense emotional state and literally made me cry. I cannot even completely verbalize why I was crying. I am not fully sure of the reasons why myself. I saw the flaws of hospital protocol. The Adult Day Hospital where the shots are administered, chemotherapy for outpatients is given, patients are rejuvenated with blood and platelets, and other cancery things get done was short staffed. The ADH as I lovingly call it is normally short staffed. I am used to that. However, I did not understand how it could be short staffed on the day after a holiday. It seems obvious to me that the ADH would catch an overflow the day after a holiday. Why not have extra hands? I understand that the nurses wanted to shop and get a good deal too (what makes them think cancer patients don’t too?) but that does not mean the hospital deserves to be short staffed. As I walked from room to room waiting for someone to call my name and give me the shot I noticed that many of the nurses and phlebotomists were watching the Amazon lightning deals and other websites promising a discount. I could not comprehend how I felt that my world was falling apart and those that were supposed to help me hold it together were more concerned with the latest video game that they could save a whopping five dollars on. On my way out of the hospital as I was replaying the events of the day in my head, steam probably visibly coming out of my ears, I stopped and realized just how stupid and selfish I was being. Off the elevator walked a little girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old, who had less hair than me. She was holding her father’s hand skipping and asking the litany of questions only a cancer patient would ask. When was she going home? What about her medications? Did mom need help picking them up? As I listened and looked at this little girl skip through the halls of Sloan, I was reminded again of everything I had been thankful for the day before. She had no worries about what day it was, what sale was to be had, or what she was missing on the outside of those walls. She was just happy to be. Today I am thankful for that little girl. Most of all I am just thankful to be alive.