It's a lot like being trapped on a roller coaster. A really good one with lots of twists and turns and huge drops — the kind that make your stomach turn over. "It," in this case, is life with cancer. And the chemo makes your stomach turn over, too, but that's a different issue.
In some ways, the life of a cancer patient becomes predictable. You learn the rhythm of the chemo. The first day, eight hours hooked up to a machine pumping poison into your arm — that's the start of the cycle. The third day, that's the first big drop on this ride. That's when the side effects hit hard. The nausea in the morning that you just have to fight through. The fatigue and so on.
And then it gets better over the next couple of days. The second week is easier, and the 3rd week off? That's a little bit of heaven.
As much as the twists and turns of this ride affect you physically, the ups and downs play havoc with your emotions, too. You look for hope where you can find it. You brace yourself for bad news. But when it comes, it still hits harder than you were prepared for.
When you can, you smile and reassure everyone in your life that the ride isn't too bad. Other times you can only admit that that last drop really got to you.
After a while, you forget what it was like to not be on the ride — that life on solid ground is over, at least for now. Your ticket is for a truly wild ride, and there's really no way to get off.Then, you think of all your family and friends praying for you and giving encouragements,suddenly,STRENGTH appears out of nowhere and you get that surge to fight on, get off the roller coaster and look for that solid ground that you once walk. INYSAALLAH GOD BLESS AMEEN.
