Vulnerability

 I don’t think you can deal with a cancer diagnosis and not find yourself vulnerable at times. This is also why I will never understand people who don’t share their journey. Maybe it’s just because I’ve had lots of lemons thrown my way in life and I didn’t share them for a long time…and once I did, I became an open book. I will tell strangers. Like, I legit don’t care who knows. It’s freeing in a lot of ways. Much better than coping in the dark, often alone and without support.

But there is a level of vulnerability a strong, independent person like myself will struggle with. Growing up, my parents put themselves first. It was about their needs and desires, not what us kids needed. It took me a lot of years to recognize that my mother is a narcissist. Everything is about her and she is incapable of feeling real empathy for others. She made a choice to choose money and an abusive asshole over my well being and that’s when I stopped talking to her. One thing she and my stepmonster taught me is that I couldn’t rely on other people because they would let me down. 

I got married when I was 22. A baby, really. I’ve been with Jeff more than half of my life. It hasn’t always been easy. We’ve had quite a lot of ups and downs, mostly due to my past traumas. But he is unwavering. He just does what a good spouse is supposed to do and even when I’m impossible to love, he loves me anyway. 

This diagnosis has been hard for him too. I’ve rarely seen him get emotional (usually I’m telling him he isn’t emotional enough) and I’ve seen this bring him to his knees. When we were in pre-op, he was crying. What makes that even sadder is the surgery took a super long time because the doctor’s assistant came down with COVID so the doctor was on her own. Jeff was the very last person in the waiting room and he didn’t even get to see me after surgery until the next morning. I can’t imagine how excruciating and exhausting that all day wait was. (So for real, if anyone reading this has any clout, this man deserves a high five and a million dollars.)

As I mentioned, it’s hard for me to accept help. I’ve overworked myself for years because I like things done a certain way and/or I just don’t like asking people to help me because I grew up believing the help would never be there. Those issues have caused problems in our relationship before and we have worked on them but somewhere in my formative years, it got into my head that if I needed help and accepted help, that made me weak. And I do not like feeling weak. 

Imagine feeling that way and then having this huge surgery where you’re barely allowed to even lift your arms afterwards. You’re going to need some help. And you have to suck it up and be vulnerable enough to accept that help. It hasn’t been easy. 

On Thursday night I wanted a shower because I hadn’t had one since the morning of surgery. Due to my incisions, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do this on my own. Jeff got me a shower chair before surgery and it was a God-send. But I still had to be willing to let him bathe me. And I hated it so much! I didn’t like feeling like I couldn’t take care of my own needs. But of course, I can’t. And that’s something I have to get over because I literally can’t reach up to wash my hair, I can’t move my arms around enough to wash myself properly. So if I wanted to be clean, I had to deal with accepting the help.

(For the record, Jeff is a better person than me because he didn’t complain even a little about helping. For real, the man deserves so much.) 

While I absolutely hate the sayings like “everything happens for a reason” and “there is a lesson in this,” because I think they are the absolute wrong thing to say to someone who’s world just girl turned upside down with a diagnosis like this…perhaps there is a big lesson here for me. I don’t have to do everything myself, I can accept help and the world will keep turning.