Diary of the Dying
By ANA FERGUSON
“I’m sorry, it’s cancer. We can’t do anything.”
Those words change you. Your life as you know is gone, over, kaput. If you’ve ever heard those words roll off a doctor’s tongue, you know exactly what it feels like in the core of your being. You know that physical retching in your throat.
Now, let’s roll out the next steps from here on this haunted house of cancer diagnosis. Our thoughts automatically take us to the worst case scenario. “That’s it – I have cancer! I am dying! It’s all over!” And it’s not just you. Friends and family automatically go into whispering “Poor Ana, she has cancer you know – did you know she’s dying?”
Your medical support team are legally bound to tell you the worst case scenario so you get given your ‘statistics’. You are thrown onto the cancer rollercoaster, you go from test to test, machine to machine, and from results to results. Every time you open a magazine, turn the TV on or play Nosey Nelly and listen in to the conversation next to you in the cafe – without a doubt you will comes across the word ‘cancer’. It’s everywhere. Cancer is our modern day plague – 1 in 2 will have to deal with it in their lives.
Now, let’s think about how we humans operate. We have a sad need to focus on all the things mad and bad in the world. We love observing negativity, we thrive on misfortune and the media is constantly feeding our insatiable appetites for all things miserable. We just lurrrv that worst case scenario. Now, you go and do the mandatory research on cancer, start Googling your chances, and all you can see is you 6 feet under in 6 months, with a quality of life in that time you can only really describe as ‘shitty’.