nekare

Six years ago, a co-worker asked my uncle, my dad’s brother, if he’d had that weird lump on his throat checked out by a doctor. Three months later he was dead from an extremely aggressive kind of cancer. My aunt’s sister lived through breast cancer only to die of leukemia five years after initially going into remission.

Needless to say, my family is terrified of sickness.

A couple of months ago my mom discovered a lump in her neck and my brother and I panicked until her brother, a plastic surgeon, told her it was only an inflamed node. This past week, my dad has been in Puerto Rico on a business trip, and he called to say he was feeling incredibly dizzy and sick, and that he couldn’t even go to work. It was mostly the fact our responsible to the extreme father wouldn’t go to work during a business trip that made us realize just how bad he must have been feeling. He came back home today, terrified out of his mind, and went straight to a doctor, thinking he might have something in his brain or was having a stroke or something equally horrible. Thankfully, it’s only a weird viral ear infection (ehhh, viral laberintitis, I think it’s called?) triggered by a badly attended cold and stress.

I don’t like living in fear like this, but I can’t really help it by now. (I once got a weird looking zit on my back – I know, wtf is a zit doing there – and went into a frenzied panic. All parties involved were suitably mystified, yes.) I hate cancer. I hate it because there’s no way to prevent it, not like HIV, or other serious diseases. I hate it because it has me and most of the people I love wondering if that innocent sounding cough couldn’t be fatal. And that’s just so fucking unfair.