What Cancer Survivorship Means to Me

No matter what age you are or where you’re from, you understand hunger.  That rumbling in your belly, the weakness in your stance, it is all an indication of need.  Need so primitive that even children can understand it yet so potent that it can fell the strongest of adults.  It hurts, the emptiness, the hollow calling, begging to be filled.  Things begin to dull, to lose shape.  But once that need is met, balance is restored.  The earth begins to reform and fill with color, and music sings its sweet refrain with a renewed vigor.

This hunger is the same with sickness and disease, but instead of a hollowness of the belly, it is a hollowness of the soul.  It is easy to lose hope when day after day is an uphill climb and you don’t have enough energy to go on.  It is easy to lose hope when your parents’ smiles are a little too sad and you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.  It is easy to lose hope when your days are spent in hospital beds and your nights pass with unease because you’re not sure you’ll ever wake up again.  It is so easy to give in to the desperate hunger.  But in the end, it takes and takes more than the sickness ever does.  Until the day comes when you are freed from the sickness, when life returns to its full color, and the fear you’ve had for so long is released.

It is strange, to feel steady after walking through the shadow of death.  All you can think is, is this real?  But you know it has to be, because for the first time you don’t feel that hunger that ached and twisted for years inside of you.  All that remains of it is a wisp, a memory, soon overwhelmed by the fascinations of a life filled with color, music, and laughter.

But that memory remains.  That hunger, which governed your life in sickness, now fuels you in health.  You are no longer controlled by it, but now you have forged it into a flame.  A flame that inspires you to demand more of yourself, of your life.  You see the possibilities where before there were only dead ends.  You seek more knowledge, more experiences, more love, more life.

Why should that hunger be confined to a cage of desperation?  It shouldn’t.  That hunger, that survivor’s flame, allows you to be bold.  To take life and live it daringly, wasting no time, because you know time is something that is never guaranteed.

To be a survivor is to know life’s fragility as well as its promises.

~~Danielle Hallworth