Cancer Happens. How Do I Deal?

By Hanna Kowal 

Every person enters a genetic lottery at birth. This lottery made me short, gave me auburn hair and made me sweaty like my dad. None of these are particularly good or bad parts of me (though I like my hair and could live without the sweat); they just exist. The lottery did not stop there, though. It also gave me a long list of family members with cancer. This, I can say with absolute certainty, sucks. 

You’ve been through this before, you know the drill was the first thought that crossed my mind when my maternal grandmother – my nana – was diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of November. In fact, as I write this, Nana is on the operating table. With a fierce determination to be supportive, I made myself available to my mother as a shoulder to lean on. I checked up on my grandparents and other members of my family so that everyone knew they had support. I even made my grandparents cookies, as baked goods have healing properties. 

After two weeks of convincing myself that I felt entirely fine, it shocked me to discover that I was sad all the time. Could it have been because I was worried about my grandmother? Well, the thought that I felt worried about the situation never even crossed my mind. I fancied myself somewhat of a professional in handling illness within the family. I believed I had it down to a science. The truth? I did not. 

My internal mantra was ‘suppress, don’t address’. Instead of allowing myself to address my worries, I shoved them deep down and told myself that I was doing the right thing. That was quite foolish of me, wasn’t it? There is no right thing to do when it comes to reacting to cancer. Even if there were, bottling up my emotions was certainly not it. 

I do believe that this reaction came from an informed place. I know that cancer does not mean death. It might, but so can driving a car or walking down the street. My dad had cancer as a teenager and survived long enough to have me. Sure, his knee is a little worse for the wear, but he is pretty much stuck with me and I do not plan on getting rid of him any time soon. 

I asked my dad, who was diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of fifteen, about how the people around him reacted to his diagnosis.‘When I was in the hospital the first week,’ he told me, ‘Malissa and Tracy came to visit, and they were looking through the window in the door. They were trying to figure out if it was the same me they saw the prior week.’ Another time, he had picked up the phone and his uncle, who thought he was speaking to my grandmother, said: ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to him.’ My dad’s brother, Jay, said he wished it was him who was sick instead. My dad also said, ‘Jason ran away. He was my friend since kindergarten.’ After he was diagnosed, he never saw Jason again. 

The takeaway here is that everyone’s reaction is unique. My dad, who is fifty now, remembers each one well. Then I asked my dad about Camp Oochigeas, a camp for kids with cancer where he was a counsellor, and Sick Kids, the hospital in downtown Toronto. He said, ‘When you’re at Sick Kids, you’re a sick kid; when you’re at Ooch, you’re not sick, you’re canoeing.’ I take this to mean that the right way to react to cancer is just to keep on living. 

My paternal grandmother, my Bubie, beat cancer twice. Chemotherapy and surgery can suck the life out of a person, but not my Bubie. From making genuine friendships at the hospital to having an endless parade of visitors, she handled cancer in probably the most wonderful way a person can. My grandfather, my Zaidy, did not survive cancer in 2014. This was a man who could and would do anything his family asked because he cared so darn much. And he died. 

For a while after that, I associated cancer with death. That is part of the reason I took my Bubie’s second round of cancer quite poorly at first. It brings me great joy to say that I still have my Bubie. At this point, I had it in my head that getting upset when you don’t know what is going to happen helps no one. When my nana was diagnosed, I forced myself to not feel what I needed to feel. I definitely will not do that again. And I hope there is no ‘again’. You hear that, Cancer? No more. Thanks.